


MSR Moments - Ficlets and Prompts

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Drabbles, Easter, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, MSR, The X-Files MSR, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 10:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 37
Words: 32,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6562546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of standalone MSR ficlets, prompts and one shots gathered here for convenience. Ratings in notes, posted in order written so new chapters at the end and then archived chronologically after a few weeks so you can read in order but the end may get jumbly!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Spy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S1 || Jersey Devil Extra || Fluff || G

There’s something different about a road-trip, some strange rolling intimacy that only hours spent side by side, radio on and trading memories and mindlessness can create. I’ve flown with Mulder, spent hours locked away in a dusty basement with him and his obsession, but this is the first time we’ve driven this far and though I’d rather die than admit it, I’m enjoying myself.

Tipped back in the passenger seat, window wound down, I watch Mulder spin the dial on our rental radio, searching for a station that’s not pop or preaching. Static feeds into our comfortable silence until I hear the unmistakable opening chords of Eric Clapton’s Layla and shoot upright to still my partner’s restless hand on the dial.

‘I love this song!’ I explain, whizzing the twizzler I have pilfered from Mulder’s junk food haul around in some vaguely rhythmic pattern. I love music I just lack the skill set to express that love very elegantly.

Mulder chuckles at my enthusiasm and cranks up the volume, ‘I never would have had you pegged as a Clapton fan’.

I roll my eyes at him, ‘And what did you base that assumption on?’ 

‘Nothing really. I guess I just thought you’d prefer… something a bit more… classical?’ He has the grace to to sound a bit sheepish and sensibly fills his mouth with candy before he can fit any more of his foot in it.

‘Clapton _is_  a classic Mulder.’ he nods his agreement, eyes wide in the rear-view mirror and I decide that this time I’ll let him off. ‘My dad had the Layla album on cassette and every time we drove anywhere on vacation we’d have it in the car. It was the only one that all of us could agree on. I guess it’s kind of our family road-trip anthem.’ I trail of, slightly self-conscious. We’ve never really discussed my family; knowing what I know about the Mulders it always seemed a unfair to parade my mostly normal childhood in front of him.

He doesn’t seem to mind though, he’s too busy playing a very wonky air guitar around the steering wheel and pulling what I’m sure he thinks is a rock-star face. I can’t suppress a giggle at how ridiculous he looks and, mock-offended, he casts a sideways glance at where I am still bobbing my half-eaten candy around, distinctly off-beat. I shimmy awkwardly, waggling my eyebrows and his scratchy chuckle joins the happy noise that fills the car. We forget that we are FBI agents with a crime to solve, that we have a lot to prove in this new partnership and a very shaky foundation to build on. For a few minutes we are just two people, flying towards Jersey in good company with a killer soundtrack. 

The last lick of guitar fades into the smooth second act of the song and though the dancing stops the closeness lingers. Eyes sliding shyly down the side of my face Mulder asks,

‘So what were the other standards of a Scully family road-trip? Scientific flash cards and carrot sticks instead of candy? Or did the weird snacking habits develop later?’’ 

I fold my arms and purse my lips, the dig at my eating habits is already old news but something in his tone, hidden behind the teasing, stops me from turning his question into a bickering point. Instead I settle back in my seat and let my mind flick back through sepia memories to those long journeys from whatever base was home to whatever beach was nearest.

‘Mom would always make cookies for the trip and Charlie would sneak too many and make himself sick. We would play I-Spy for hours until Melissa had won too many rounds and Bill threw a strop. I always had to sit in the middle because I was the smallest _and_ the least likely to try and climb into the front when I got bored. I used to moan but I secretly liked it, I could catch my dad’s eye in the rear-view and it was like we had little conversations that nobody else knew about.’

I lose myself in the past and when I come to I catch Mulder looking at me with a far-away longing in his eyes, car drifting slightly towards the central reservation. I poke his hand with the end of my twizzler and he snaps his gaze back to the road and straightens his course, red-faced at being caught staring.

A few moments of silence stretch out like white lines on a long highway before Mulder speaks.

‘I spy, with my little eye… something beginning with “U”’.

I glance round the car and come up with upholstery, umbrella and ugly tie, all of which earn me a no (and the last an indignant rebuttal.) before turning my attention to the passing countryside with no more success. After several minutes of increasingly far-fetched guessing I give up.

He smirks and point upwards and I crane my neck to see up through the windshield. Nothing.

‘Okay, Mulder. what gives?’ I demand.

‘ _Obviously_ it’s a U.F.O. Scully! I thought that would be your first guess!’ Mulder’s announcement is as smug as it is ridiculous and my mouth drops open in disbelief.

‘Why you dirty cheat! There’s not a damn thing up there Mulder! And don’t try and tell me that it’s invisible or I’ll hit you with more than just a twizzler.’

He only shrugs, unapologetic.

‘I know what I saw Scully. And I guess it’s still my turn, so…. I spy something beginning with “A”’.

‘Asinine asshole?’ I offer bitterly, ‘Absolute moron?’ Mulder chuckles and reaches across to start spinning the radio dial again,

‘I’m starting to think that Bill wasn’t the only sore loser in the Scully clan’. I sigh heavily, letting my disapproval hiss with through my teeth and start to plot ways to get him back. When Mulder settles on a classic rock station  I decide the next time a song I know comes on I will sing along. Loudly. Three minutes of tone deaf Led Zepplin sounds like just what the doctor ordered.


	2. Zen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S1 || Office Moment || Humour || G
> 
> It's 1994 and Scully is looking forward to weekend off. What could possibly go wrong? Based on an alphabet prompt request "Z-Zen? You drop that on me and then ask me to be zen?!"

It’s almost six o’clock by the time I make it back to the basement with my folder of lab results. Nothing to report but plenty to read and I have no doubt that that’s exactly what Agent Mulder will spend some of the weekend doing, combing every test for an anomaly, calling me sporadically as I try to pretend that I have a normal weekend life to double check the science that is beyond him. The seam at the toe of my pantyhose has slid around and is rubbing the ball of my foot where it slides inside my shoe, irritating and repetitive, the perfect bookend to an irritating, repetitive week.

I calculate that even including the first degree I’m sure to get from Mulder and Friday night traffic  I can be out of the suit and in the bath within an hour. Finally a weekend to myself without possible aliens or dead cows or murderous mutants, I speed down the corridor on a wave of optimism and almost crash into A.D. Skinner as he exits our basement office.

I step back, noting the stern expression on his face and my heart sinks. What has Mulder done now?

Our boss doesn’t stop to greet me or offer any more information than the set of his jaw, a curt ‘Scully’ and a slight shake of his head before he turns and leaves. As I shoulder open the door and dump my files on the side I find my partner sat behind his desk with the face of a man who has just been dumped at the prom.

‘What’s wrong now Mulder?’ I ask him, struggling to marry his disappointment and Skinner’s irritation.

‘I can’t go see the crop circles in Idaho any more’, he replies, doleful as a child denied ice-cream on a sunny day. ‘I have to stay here and do paperwork.’

 I ignore, as I have done every time he’s mentioned it, the ridiculousness that is a man in his thirties spending a free weekend visiting grass patterns in the potato state and focus instead on the cause of his disappointment.

‘What paperwork Mulder? We filed the report on last week’s case. We’re all up to date?’

His face drops another few notches as I struggle to comprehend the issue. His voice is now low and apologetic and I realise whatever it is he knows that I’m not going to like it.

‘Scully…. I…. Please don’t be mad… it’s my fault and I’ll fix it so you just be… be zen or whatever the Catholic version is okay?’

I click my tongue impatiently, how is it that this man can reel off the most ridiculous conspiracy theory without drawing breath but the second he has to confess something mundane to me he can’t string a sentence together? I glance at my watch. 6:07. I get the feeling I won't be getting my bath any time soon.

‘Just spit it out Mulder’, and I inject the weariness of my week and the pinch of my shoes into my demand, pinning him in my glare. He takes a deep breath and the words tumble free,

‘A.D. Skinner just came down to inform me that we’re now almost six months behind on our expense claims and that if we don’t submit them in their entirety by first thing Monday then the X-Files will be suspended until such a time as an investigative audit and review of our spending can be completed.’

My hands fall from my hips and I do a pretty good impression of one of Mulder’s fish, failing to find the words to respond to him.

‘But-’, is all I manage before he keeps on with the bombshells.

‘I know you’re about to tell me that you filed all your forms and that there must be a mistake but the truth is that I never did my half and…’ he reaches into his desk drawer and removes a thick stack of manila with the tell-tale pink of expense forms poking out of the top. I see my handwriting. ‘I kinda never got around to it’, he finishes lamely.

Confession completed he meets my gaze with expectation, waiting for me to respond. In the five months we have been working together his outbursts have often robbed me of speech but never because I can’t fit words out around my anger. He senses my rolling fury and attempts to defuse it,

‘But it’s okay Scully - I’ll finish it this and it’ll be okay. So you go home. Do whatever it is you do and just…. Remember about the zen?’ And then my voice bursts past the lock of my jaw and fills the tiny office, reverberating from the concrete walls.

‘Zen? You drop that on me and then ask me to be zen?! What the hell you stupid son-of-a-.... You know that an investigation into our financial integrity will go on our permanent record right? That it could affect whatever assignment comes next for us if they ever make good on their threat to shut down your precious X-Files?! I mean I know that you prefer the up in the air crazy bullshit to the nitty-gritty of procedural police work but I never thought you were stupid enough to forget the basics. I mean god Mulder! What in hell were you doing those afternoons when we sat and said we would do our fucking expenses? Playing with blurry pictures? Doodling “I heart aliens” on your binder like the feckless child you apparently are? And now of course it comes back to bite us in the ass the one time we have a weekend not filled by possessions or parasites. I really, really hate you right now you know Mulder?’

He’s slumped down slightly in his chair under the force of my outburst and for the first time in our relationship I feel like the tall one. His eyes are wide with apology and as quickly as my anger ignited I feel it drain away to the resigned frustration which is my constant companion in our partnership.

‘I’m not asking you to stay Scully’, is his eventual response, ‘You shouldn’t have to suffer because I’m an idiot.’ And I sigh because as much as I wish this were true there is no way Mulder is getting through all that paperwork on his own. FBI bureaucracy is such that it takes about 15 minutes to claim for a cup of coffee and some of our expenses require… careful justification.

‘Mulder, I might trust you with my life but that trust does not extend to believing that you will spend 24 plus hours sat in here doing paperwork without getting distracted by a beast-woman or a poltergeist. Which means that this,’ I gesture at the pile of forms, ‘is my problem too.’ I’m resigned now and the dream bath has been pushed back behind a rapidly forming scheme of the most efficient way to get this done.

Kicking off my shoes and sighing at the relief I reach across and reclaim my filled out forms, a light covering of dust indicating just how long some of these have been forgotten for. Collapsing in my chair I kick my feet up on the desk and flip open the first folder.

‘I think we should go chronologically and I can tell you what I wrote, the dates and addresses etc. If you copy all that across it should speed thing up a little bit. So that means we start off in Bellefleur. Flight number - Mulder are you even listening?’ I glance up to find his eyes fixed on my feet on the desk, red toenails at odds with the bureau grey of our surroundings.

‘Hmm?’ he says, running his eyes up my body to my face in a way that sends a flush of heat through me. I push it down, writing it up to tiredness and leftover anger.

‘Mulder, please can you focus?’ my demand is weary and he nods before pulling a stack of blank forms in front of him and uncapping a pen.

I return my attention to the ticket stub in front of me, remembering the turbulence and the nervous excitement I’d experienced, out in the field for the first time with an FBI legend, albeit a slightly tarnished one, as my partner. It seems like forever ago and it’s my turn to be snapped back to the present by Mulder’s teasing voice,

‘You know Scully, you really do have the cutest little feet.’ and this time I blush hard, self-consciously pulling my feet off display and tucking them under me. “Paperwork”, I tell my racing pulse and this time I refuse to look up and meet his gaze, unsure what I’ll find in the changing hazel of his eyes. I fight for a neutral tone.

‘Mulder, I may be helping you but it’s for purely selfish reasons and if you keep messing about you are going to find one of my cute little feet kicking your ass across the room.’

I hear him inhale sharply and half-smile at the response but again resist the temptation to see whether he’s laughing or shocked. ‘So Bellefleur.’ I return to the job in hand and start to rattle through the practicalities of our shared history, a companionable hum settling over the two of us as we settle into our familiar rhythm of give and take.

When we next pause for Mulder to put the coffee machine on I stretch out and groan appreciatively as my spine pops and some of the tension of my posture drains away. Mulder turns to look at me, an unreadable half smile on his lips, his voice low.

‘You know Scully,’ he tells me, ‘I never would have had you down as a red nail-polish kind of a girl’.

In the low light that has settled, post-sunset on our office I hope that he can’t see the flush of my cheeks, the increase of my pulse as I allow an eyebrow to arch and crackle of intrigue into my voice.

‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me Mulder’. His eyes widen and he busies himself with with the mugs, turning away. I glance down at my watch. 9:18 pm. I ignore the little voice that tells me I’m having a better time here with him and paperwork that I would be home alone and I settle in for another long night.


	3. The Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S3 || Vignette || Fulffy Angst || G Rated.  
> Short ficlet of what might have happened the next time Mulder interrupts a Scully family dinner post Gethsemane... it's Easter and the phone rings.  
> 

He doesn’t tell her much, only that it’s urgent, that he needs her to come right away and as usual she doesn’t hesitate. He still can’t believe that somebody as smart as she is trusts in him enough to step away from a family weekend, jump in a car and drive to a park in the middle of nowhere. Nobody has ever believed in him in such an unwavering way. And today he wants to thank her.

* * *

_She doesn’t tell him how desperate she was to get out of the noisy house, to avoid questions about her life and death that there are no new answers to. She supposes she should feel guilty to choose work over family, to choose him over family, but she doesn’t. Whatever hopeless chase they are about to go on will feel more like home to her than the cosy scene she has just left behind. She presses hard on the gas, leaving the city behind._

* * *

As she steps out of her car and the dappled shade he thinks that she belongs in eternal sunshine. The red of her hair is burnished bronze by the sun and she squints over at him, looking for the reason they are here, for the manic spark of discovery in his eyes.

But instead he’s smiling as he holds out an empty basket and she regards it with utter confusion.

“Mulder, what the hell is this for?” Even for him this is bizarre and he enjoys watching her cycle through the possibilities. She won’t guess though, he’s sure of it. 

“Scully”, he fights to keep his tone serious. “We’re going on an egg hunt”.

* * *

_She still can’t believe they’re doing this, strolling through the woodlands laughing like children as she tries desperately to spot the eggs that her paranoid partner has hidden far too thoroughly. He told her that he owed her a search that would result in some tangible finds, that it would be good practice for their search for “the truth” but she thinks really he just missed her. She’s missed him even if it has only been a few days._

_He notices she’s lost in her thoughts and takes the chance to kick at a lump of moss, slightly uncovering bright foil and then whoops with delight when she makes a show of finding it a few minutes later. She can’t remember the last time she saw him so full of life. She wants to catch the essence of this Mulder, save it and give it back to him next time the world closes in around them and takes away something they hold dear. She prays that she wont need to, that they can live in this golden afternoon forever._

* * *

He watches the twilight start to drain the colour from her cheeks and dull the shine of the heap of eggs she’s piled in her lap. The hood of the car is still warm beneath them and they have maybe an hour before darkness will swallow the day. He hopes that for once he has been able to give her something, she has lost so much because of him and he would spend his life balancing the equation for her happiness if he only knew how.

A small hand slips into his and he meets her gaze, thank-yous and apologies and all of the things they never quite manage to say hanging heavy in the cooling air. Her eyes tell him that his has been a perfect day and it breaks his heart that something so simple, so everyday for most people is such a rarity in her life. He vows then to fill her days with more easy moments, to be light instead of darkness but she thinks to herself that the faraway look in his eyes is a signal that whatever the day has been has now come to an end.

* * *

_She shivers involuntarily and the delicately balanced stack of eggs falls from her lap, gold spilling across the asphalt in all directions. Mulder leaps after them, snatching up her trophies and piling them back in her arms, trying to recapture a moment that has already gone._


	4. Portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S4 || Vignette || Angst || Teen for issues
> 
> A 5 minute drabble set just before Redux.

He’ll remember these twilight moments. He promises himself that; that the giddy highs and devastating lows won’t wash the sweet inbetweens from his album of memories.

He wonders how the biggest part of his life can be so small a person, how the universe packed the energy and wonder of a thousand sunrises into one petite package and delivered it into his life when he needed it most. He will always need her the most. Even after she is gone.

She tells him not to thinks of it, not with words but with her eyes, bright still in the deepening canyons of her face and he smiles and nods as if he is not falling into those same dark places, following her into the night after which there will be no more sunrises. No more twilights.

He sketches her in his mind. Memorising the tender curve of her cheek and the petulance of her lips. In sickness and in health all of his favourite sounds begin on the tip of her tongue, moulded by the firmness of her resolve and are sent to him on a kiss of air. She told him once that she hated her nose, the hard lines of it pointing straight back to unkind words in the schoolroom and the sudden plateau at its end. He thought to himself that she shouldn’t blame her nose for wanting to be closer to her lips, to curve achingly towards them as he had for so many years. As he did still.

A flutter signals she is awake again. For how long he can’t be sure but for now he stops cataloguing her freckles, stops recording her breaths for the years to come. He drowns his sorrow in her blue, takes her hand in his and paints on his bedside smile.

For now he will be near her. Surround himself in all that she is.

And when the time comes, this is how he will remember her.


	5. Trivia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S4 || Vignette || Angst || Teen for issues
> 
> Memento Mori - ish

She remembers reading somewhere that Cancer is the dimmest of all the Zodiac constellations. That it only has two stars of the brightest magnitude and so, swings quietly across the heavens nestled between Gemini and Leo. She thinks that she’ll tell Mulder that later, win one of those rare, face-transforming smiles that only heavy flirtation or excessive nerdiness can summon. 

Maybe she’ll use it as a warm up. “Hey, Mulder! Check out my space fact - oh and also I am dying of cancer. Not the constellation. Don’t worry about last week, about the man or the tattoo or what any of it means. None of that really matters any more.” 

Soon it will slip along with the rest of her into the black hole that opened up without them noticing in the middle of their own small constellation. 

Soon there will be only one bright star in the darkness.

Soon she will be gone. And he will endure, alone with his quest and his trivia and that smile hidden away somewhere in the back of his mind with the other lost things. She thinks she’s sadder about that than she is about dying. 

How can she tell him that. 

How can she tell him goodbye.


	6. Small Blessings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S5 || Post Emily AU || Thanksgiving Fluff || G

_**1998** _

* * *

It isn’t the Thanksgiving either of them are used to. For Scully there is a bittersweet relief in the expectations and politics of her family being all the way across the country. Eleven months is not long to learn how to be a whole new person, how to be a parent, and the freedom to make all those first holiday mistakes away from the critical eye of her brother is a welcome one. She misses her mom but there is so much new to appreciate that it takes the sting out of Maggie’s absence.

Mulder’s smile is the biggest part of that. He’s spent a decade of Thanksgivings alone, or sitting stiffly at his mother’s side, ignoring the empty seats at the table. Now his table is full and she’s never seen him smile so big or for so long. It’s pounding rain outside but there’s a fire in the fireplace and the sunlit memories of long summer hours spent playing house and making a home lights them all from the inside. Emily is sprawled in front of the TV, still in her footie pajamas even though it’s almost lunch time but it doesn’t matter.

Gone are the days when Scully worried about what her apartment looked like. Now all that matters is what they look like.

And they look like a family. A growing one. 

Mulder slams the oven door shut on the turkey and hands her a mug. Ginger tea,

‘You look a little queasy’ he explains as he tucks his hand in it’s place in the small of her back and rubs softly, drawing her across the room and settling on the couch.

From across the room their picture smiles at them, Emily squished between a grinning Mulder and a still shell-shocked Scully the day they found out that what she thought was a gluten intolerance was actually six weeks worth of cell division with both their genes in the mix. It should be impossible, this is all so impossible and yet…

An animated fox gambols across the screen and Scully sniggers and points, 

‘She loves this movie Mulder… and honestly… the fox reminds me of you. He wants to believe in everything but doesn’t know who to trust when the world goes mad.’

Mulder shakes his head and kisses her softly.

‘I know exactly who to trust.’

Scully flushes. Even after six months of this she’s still not used to how easily it fits together, to the warm security she feels when Mulder verbalises his adoration. It’s too much and so she snuffles her face into his shoulder, burying her blushes in the softness of his tee. She feels his hand creep up her shirt and he skin tingles and then calms when his palm settles over the gentle curve of her belly. It still seems so strange that after years spent chasing scientific evidence, the miracle they finally get to experience, their proof of the impossible lies so close to home they can both touch it. A few more months and they will be able to hold it. Him. Watch him grow.

Far away thoughts are brought back home with a tug on Mulder’s elbow and big blue eyes join forces with Emily’s voice as she demands they make space.

There’s always space for her. For them. Mulder’s long arms sheltering all his most precious possessions as they settle in for a long afternoon of sweet nothing.

Scully’s dozing when she hears Emily ask Mulder a question.

‘I’m cosy. Can we stay like this forever?’

The movie answers her before he can,

‘Darling, forever is a long, long time, and time has a way of changing things.’

And Scully shakes her head, opening her eyes to find Mulder’s eyes fixed on hers over Emily’s head.

‘Not this.’ he tells her. And despite her knowledge that all things must pass, that time is a universal invariant… she believes he is right.

‘Not us’ She agrees, losing her finger in her daughter’s hair and pulling her closer. ‘Not ever.’

 


	7. Leaving and Waiting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S5 || Chinga post-ep || Teen || TW: death

They’re too far back to hear the crunch of folding metal, too far away to help in any way other than by pulling half on to the central reservation to let the fire crew and the ambulance through. They’re too far away to know what has happened, but too close to escape and as the traffic builds behind them, ranks of cars leaning in to find out the ending, Mulder tunes the radio to a local news station.

They don’t talk, not even as people start to get out of the vehicles around them and turn to each other to try and comprehend the tragedy that has brought them together. Mulder methodically shells sunflower seeds into the cup holder and Scully stares straight ahead, the blankness of her expression masking her thoughts which dance from darkness to mundanity in the stillness.

Minutes pass and their car is an island of calm in a sea of people; they perfected the art of comfortable silences on a rural highway in New Jersey, back when chasing the Jersey Devil was the closest they’d gotten to running for their lives. Today though there’s a distortion to it, a sense that they are waiting for something significant to happen before they will speak, though neither of them had planned to say anything of importance when they’d got into the car.

It happens thirteen minutes after the traffic stops.

“It is with great sadness that we at KATC Radio must inform you that the driver and the passenger of the overturned car on route twelve have both been pronounced dead at the scene. The crash appears to have been accidental, most likely due to loss of control and there are no other casualties. Police have told us that the victims were an elderly couple, known in the local community, their loved ones have been informed. We’d like to express our deepest sympathy to all affected and will bring you regular updates on the efforts to clear the road for traf-’

Mulder slaps the radio off hard enough that the plastic cracks.

‘Because the state of the road is clearly the important thing here.’

Scully regards him quietly, surprised by the strength of his reaction and the shake of his jaw as it clenches,

‘It’s their job to report the traffic Mulder. Even when the cause of the problem is so awful.’ Scully’s words are logical but her tone is tentative, tender even. Her partner is prone to ranting but to see him actually shaken is a rarity, and she knows that there’s something more to all this than a small-town radio DJ reporting a fatal traffic accident. Death is too often a part of their day.

When he doesn’t speak again, instead twisting the empty plastic of his empty seed packet around his finger in rustling, constricting circles, she reaches across the centre console and stops him. The plastic falls to the floor and she smooths his fingers out of their nervous tangle, running long soothing lines with her hands on either side of his.

His jaw relaxes a little but his eyes are still locked to a vanishing point off in the distance and his shoulders are high and defensive. So Scully starts talking, unsure as she begins where she is going but willing to try anything to stop the short, sob-like breaths that Mulder is taking.

‘When I was little, four or five maybe, a couple from our church were killed in a road accident.  A drunk driver ran them off the highway and into a tree. I remember sitting in a pew at the memorial, my shoes pinched and I was too hot and I understood that Mr and Mrs Arthur wouldn’t be coming back but I didn’t really understand what it all meant, Until their daughter went up to give a eulogy. She was in her thirties I suppose, and Missy whispered that she’d been crying because her makeup was a little smudged but when she started speaking she didn’t cry. She smiled. She talked about her parents, and their happiness and their lives together and said that she would miss them but they were together and with God and that that’s ultimately all they wanted, in life and in death. She seemed so comforted by the idea, and I didn’t really understand why, even when I looked over and caught my dad looking at mom and squeezing her hand. But since my dad…’ she trails off for a moment, her grief seeping to the surface as it does in unexpected moments.

‘I sometimes think if my mom could have chosen to go at the same moment Ahab did, she would have. Even now, we’ll be sitting in the living room and she’ll turn to ask him something and his absence is suddenly so painfully real. Being left behind when your love is gone… maybe it’s better they went together.’

This time when Scully melts into silence she doesn’t come back, her hands still in their soothing as Mulder processes her words. It’s odd really, given how many times they have stared down death, how little they have talked about dying. Mulder has seen Scully’s gravestone, planned his last words to her but he has no idea if she fears death, or what song she would choose for her funeral and god he can’t think about her needing a funeral. Instead he fills the silence with his own experience. There is no church service here, but the same uncertainty and fear lingers bitterly in the air of his memory.

‘We never had a funeral. For Sam, vigils yes but no closure, no promises of a better place, just all of us waiting for her to come back to the place were we were. She was never officially dead, always missing but our house felt like a funeral parlour. It was too clean, too neat and for years people would send us ostentatiously large sympathy bouquets  that my mother would toss on the nearest table and the cleaner would take out a week later. The place reeked of lilies for months, and I used to avoid the rooms with the flowers because they felt like an admission that Samantha wasn’t coming back. My first funeral was at college, a close friend’s grandparent who I’d met a couple of times, and I remember thinking that funerals were actually more bearable than that time I spent waiting. 

Waiting for Samantha to be found. Waiting for you to be returned, to wake up from your coma. The days when it takes a few too many rings for you to get to your phone and I start to imagine reasons why you wont answer, why you may never answer again. Scully… I call you in the night mostly because I wake up convinced that something terrible has happened and I can’t even wait until morning to be sure that I’m wrong. 

That’s what I couldn’t bear about the radio story. The thought of whoever it was that was waiting for that couple not knowing why they don’t arrive. Wondering how long it will take for somebody to tell them. Were they the “loved ones” or just friends who had made a pot of coffee? Have they heard the news report? Are they wondering with a sick gnawing in the pit of their stomach whether maybe, just maybe, the reason their friends haven’t arrived isn’t the traffic but that they were the ones who didn’t make it. I imagine them listening to the radio, hearing the traffic getting update, “one lane now open”, and as we all get back to our lives, they still don’t know if they need to grieve or not.

I can’t do that again Scully, Wait and not know.’

And he’s holding her hand hard enough to tell her that it’s her he would be waiting for. She wants to cling to him, but she doesn’t, she justs holds on and promises him wordlessly that she won’t make him wait if he promises not to leave her behind.

They stay that way until the traffic starts to move.


	8. Merry and Bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 6 - Post How the Ghosts Stole Christmas || MSR || G Rated
> 
> This is the fluffiest fluff of all fluffdom…

Scully hears it before she sees it, that unmistakable slide of paper caught between door and floor. For a moment she panics. In her line of work anonymous notes often begin deadly games of cat and mouse but as the soft lights of her Christmas tree settle over her she reasons that it’s much more likely a late holiday greeting from one of her neighbours. She dumps her bag of gifts next to the side-table, grimacing at the thought of finding a home for Tara’s latest framed motivational quote before she bends to retrieve the envelope.

When instead Scully sees her name in Mulder’s untidy scrawl on a folded sheet of lined paper she alters her expectations. After the haunted house adventure of the night before this is much more likely to be an invitation to a Boxing Day seance than a Christmas greeting. She should probably be crosser about the intrusion than she is.

She sighs and crosses to the fridge, twisting the top off a beer as she unfolds the letter, braced for a newspaper clipping about evil cows or possessed Christmas elves to flutter out. But there are only words.

> _Scully-_
> 
> _I am well aware that writing this make me a terrible person. What kind asshole of a colleague invades their partner’s Christmas plans twice? The spooky kind it seems. I may have had a beer for breakfast in preparation for my mother’s call and that (and the calming one I had after I survived it ) probably has a lot to do with this arriving on your doorstep. That and the fact that I’m selfish and was hoping that if you finished early at your mother’s you might fancy a cheesy Christmas movie night with your useless partner who is spending Christmas all on his own (yes - I played the pity card). Anyway. If you get this before 8 and want to come over… I’ll get that gross type of butterless popcorn in for you. Just in case. If you get this after 9…   Don’t bother coming to find me, I’ll be knee deep in Cheetos and HBO and there’s nothing festive about that. **-M**_
> 
> _Oh and Scully? Merry Christmas… I know not many of our days are bright but I will try harder for merry._

Scully ignores the flush in her cheeks and her chest that has nothing to do with the beer and glances at the clock. 8:25…

* * *

Mulder pretends not to look at his watch for the 800th time since the neighbours irritating cuckoo clock struck 8pm through the wall. He knows, for the same reason, that it’s now past 9. Knows that Scully’s probably still on her way back from her mothers and even if she is home early, it’s more than likely she’ll need a long bath to soak off the tension of long hours spent with Bill Jr. He’s just decided he’ll wait ten more minutes before taking off his jeans and resigning himself to a night spent with some seasonal pornography when there’s a soft shuffle and a tap at his door.

Mulder’s surprise drives him upright in one movement, dislodging the jumbo bag of cheetos and covering his floor in powdery orange balls. He swears loudly, trapped by his accident in a minefield of neon orange snack just waiting to grind themselves into his floor and tempt back the mice he’s just got rid of. In the confusion of the moment he misses Scully letting herself in until she steps into his field of vision. 

‘When you said “knee deep in cheetos,” I thought you were speaking figuratively,’ she quips. ‘Though you may have underestimated how many you’d need to reach that high.’ He can’t believe she came. That Scully is standing rosy, cheeked and in a soft green sweater in his living room on Christmas, joking about snackfoods. Mulder realises he’s staring only when the red in her cheeks deepens slightly and he scrambles for an appropriate comeback, something to steer them back into familiar territory.

‘I was actually using your knees as the standard Scully and I think I judged it exactly right.’ is his best effort and he is rewarded with a familiar smile, Scully’s patented, “You think you’re funny but I’m going to make you beg” look.

‘Mulder… you’re stuck in a sea of cheetos and I’m the only one who can get to your broom and save you spreading that cheese dust further than it’s already gone. Are you sure you want to mock me for being short… and on Christmas too?’ He voice is sweet but iron strong and Mulder has no doubt that she will leave him hanging if she feels like it, so he shakes his head contritely.

‘You’re right Scully. You are the absolute, perfect height for a human and I will never imply anything else from this day forth.’ Mulder starts off joking but can’t keep the sincerity out of his voice when he meets her gaze. Everything about Scully is the perfect way for a human to be and he hopes she knows that.

Scully only nods

‘Apology accepted. Now tell me I can pick the movie.’

‘You can pick the movie.’ She can pick every movie he ever watches if she wants to.

‘And did you get my popcorn?’ He points to the packet on the table, next to another bag of cheetos.

‘Good boy. Now let’s see about digging you out of your cheesy prison shall we.’

And she does. As neatly and efficiently as she does everything. As neatly and efficiently as she claimed his heart.

When Mulder hears the clock strike midnight and whisk away another Christmas he sends up a thankful prayer for the baby Jesus and Santa and the Grinch for making his Christmas wish come true. If you had told him last year that he’d both welcome and wave off the holiday with Dana Scully curled at his side, dozing sweetly in front of an old movie, he’d have called you insane. Yet here, impossibly she is.

Very gently he rests his cheek against the polished bronze of her hair and she snuffles closer to his neck. Let Bing and the gang keep their white Christmases. Fox Mulder likes his in red.


	9. The Way Things Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 6 || MSR || PG

It’s not until the smoke alarm starts shrieking that Scully realises the acrid smell of smoke is very real. She’d stirred groggily a minute before and assumed it was a new manifestation of her recurring dream; running headlong in utter darkness, away from some unknown, apparently burning, catastrophe. She was wrong. This catastrophe is very knowable, totally tangible, and manifests as a smoke-stained, swearing Mulder using her new kitchen curtains to smother the flames leaping from her best, copper bottomed skillet.

There have been times when his ineptitude has endeared him to her, where taking care of six feet of walking disaster has been an appealing prospect. This is not one of those times. 

As the building’s fire system picks up the smoke clawing past the seal of her doorway, Scully pulls out the small extinguisher she keeps and douses the smouldering curtains, the pan and the parts of her partner that don’t move out the way fast enough. Mulder flinches, whether from the freezing foam or the expression on her face she’s not sure, and he wisely chooses not to resist when she grabs the scruff of his t-shirt and drags him away from the hob. Wrinkling her nose at his slightly alcoholic scent, Scully pauses only to grab her overcoat from it’s hook, before steering him into the hall where they join a grumbling, sleep weary parade to the street.

Scully leaves Mulder on the kerb without so much as a word, brushing off his jumbled, beery apologies, and goes to find the super. 

By the time she returns to him, the fire brigade have arrived and been sent away and Scully’s FBI ID has made numerous appearances to smooth things over. All of her calm, measured, words have been exhausted, disappearing along with the other residents of the building, until it is just the two of them left on the pavement.

It’s freezing out and Mulder would shiver, stood in his wet t-shirt and sodden jeans, if he didn’t feel like his discomfort would somehow make Scully angrier with him. If that’s even possible. Her eyes flash in the streetlight and she’s working up to something, something explosive and all Mulder can think to say is, 

‘I’m so sorry Scully. I just wanted a sandwich, I didn’t mean to start a fire! I was making you one too…’

And for the second time that evening his good intentions blow up in his face.

‘You never _mean_ to screw things up Mulder! Never! But somehow you always find a way. I’m not even going to ask why you were in my apartment at 1am after games night with the Gunmen. I’m definitely not going to ask you what the hell inspired you to try cooking. But I will ask you this. Do you ever, _ever_  think before you do a thing? Before you jump off a bridge on to a train? Or ditch me for a new conspiracy or spontaneous trip or another woman? Did you think at all before you invited Fowley back into your life? Into our lives? Did you think about what it might do to us? Our partnership? Did you care?’ Her voice starts low and gathers into an inferno of hurt feelings and frustration

‘Scully - I-’ Mulder is powerless to stop it. She’s pacing now, hands on hips on the deserted pavement as the lights in the building above flick off one by one.

‘Not now Mulder. It’s my turn to not think and just say until I ruin everything - I’ve earned that at least haven’t I? Do you have _any_  idea how exhausting it is to be the one who thinks everything through? To justify over and over again to the bureau things I can barely justify to myself? I don’t know how much longer I can do it Mulder. I can’t just be the person who reigns you in, the person who fixes things for you and keeps you honest. Constant? Touchstone? I’m just a human for god’s sake and I need more! I _deserve_ more… I deserve…’ the words dies on her lips and she sags. Scully knows what she wants, what she needs and what she thinks she has earned… but it’s not the kind of thing she has ever or will ever ask for. Not from any man and definitely not from Mulder. He speaks again, his voice rough with apology and shaking with cold.

‘You deserve everything Scully’, and somehow he’s in her space, reaching for her with his clumsy, competent hands and she backs away until there is nowhere to go, until there is only the wall at her back, the darkness in front and him in between. 

There’s a fire in Mulder’s eyes now and he’s close, too close, to everything she wants. Just like the time in the corridor he edges thoughtlessly, recklessly towards becoming her everything and destroying the last vestiges of the world she spent 27 years building before she met him. He hesitates, he always hesitates and in the breath before the blaze she ducks out from under him and runs for the door, almost pulling it closed in time to keep him away from her.

‘Scully! Wait!’ And she’s scrambling for the stairwell, the lifts still out of action, praying somehow that her legs will get longer and outpace his just long enough to hide her safely away.

Mulder catches her on the first landing, grabs her wrist and spins her close to him.

‘No.’ she tells him, but her eyes in the emergency light say yes and her body is begging please, melting into him even as she tries to resist. This time there is no bee, just him curling round her like smoke and then kisses, hungry, desperate kisses that rob her of air and sense. There is a railing in her back and his hand in her hair, on her hip and Scully tastes beer and hope on Mulder’s tongue. He has her completely and still strains to pull her closer, hard against her as her name slips drunkenly around his kisses, wondering at the events that have brought them to this moment.

After an eternity they separate and he stumbles backwards. Doubts immediately start tumbling into the cold space where his body once was and as Scully watches, he searches for his next move, swaying slightly with the aftershocks, eyes unfocused and hands hanging uselessly at his sides. 

Scully closes her eyes when she recognises his panic face. She should have known better. One more decision made in the heat of the moment that it will fall to her to tidy away.

She starts back up the stairs, hoping he will not follow, but is unsurprised when he does. She counts two of his steps to every three of hers. When she reaches her door she pauses. She doesn’t look at him. 

She can’t.

‘Mulder… I don’t think you meant to do that. Or thought about what it might mean… And I don’t want you to torture yourself about what comes next, because I’m going to make this really easy for you. What comes next is nothing. The last thing we need right now is you riddled with guilt over a drunken attempt to reassure your frustrated partner so let’s not make this more than it is okay?’

And then she lets herself in and closes the door leaving Mulder frozen in the hallway. Alone again in her apartment, Scully sinks to the floor, the choking smell of fire and the sting of smoke in her eyes not enough to burn the taste of his lips from her memory. 

So she locks it away. One more thing to add to the long list of things they pretend to have forgotten. Scully sweeps her feelings into the trash along with her curtain and her skillet. They’re safer there.


	10. Definition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 6 || Teen || Fowley | First Line Prompt Response

‘Mulder, if you don’t shut up soon I won’t do that thing you like so much,“ she said, playfully running her finger down the edge of his tie. 

He slaps her hand away, harder that he meant to and it’s enough for her to take a step back, to give him an opening for what he has told her ten times but she has yet to comprehend.

‘I don’t want that from you Diana.’ He says flatly, staring her down when she goes to step back into the space he has just ejected her from. ‘I keep telling you.’ And he means it, loads his voice with every ounce of regret and weight and loathing he can find and it’s still not enough to keep that flirtatious little smile, the one he used to be so proud to command, off her face.

‘That’s not how it seemed last week. That’s not how it felt when we-’

‘When we fucked?’ Mulder is done with treading gently and he grabs her wrists as she once again tries to lay hands on what is not hers to touch. ‘Well, you fucked me and I fucked up. I’m good at that remember?’ Memories flash between them in ugly gusts. ‘You want to know it felt Diana? How I felt? You wanna actually hear what I have to say for once? Because at first I felt relieved. It’s been a while and part of me wondered if I remembered the mechanics of sex, but once that passed, once I’d burned off the booze and the bitterness that made me accept your invitation, I just felt incredibly alone. Scully had made me feel small that day, laughing at something I thought was important but I realised, naked in your bed, that I couldn’t remember what that something was, that I’d made a horrible mistake, that I was screwing up the only good thing in my life by screwing you.’

‘Fox, stop! You don’t mean any of-’ but he can’t stop, can’t hold back any more.

‘I do mean it Diana. I meant it when I said no the day you came back. And every time I said no afterwards. I meant no even when I told you yes, even when that self-destructive man you once claimed to love came back from the dead and went to bed with you. Because Fox is dead, Diana. Fox died sometime after you walked out and before Scully arrived.

He drops her hands then, with enough finality that Diana instinctively steps back as though he will fall down after them. But he stays standing, fixes her in a gaze she didn’t know he possessed.

‘My name is Mulder,’ he tells her. ‘And what I would like, the _only thing_  I want from you, is for you to leave me alone, to stay away from me while I try and rescue the only thing in my life that is worth anything.’

And finally Diana understands. ‘You are in love with her then.’ 

This time Mulder is the one to lean in, close enough she can see the clarity of his truth, taste his sincerity on every word.

‘Love is far too small a word to explain what Scully is to me. But you should know Diana, that I gave up Samantha for her. And I would do it again. Without hesitation.’ On that, Mulder strides away in search of Scully and salvation, and leaves Diana stranded in the hallway, crushed under the weight of his confession.


	11. Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S6 || Monday Post-Ep || Angst || Teen for Issues
> 
> Beta-less entry for @txf-fic-chicks post-ep/missing scene challenge. This one is for Kristin. She knows why.

He grabs Scully’s elbow as soon as Skinner’s door edges shut, desperate to grasp her firm angles and so rewrite his last sensory memory of her, warm hand on his dying chest, with his living breathing partner. She looks at him like he’s insane. She’s looked at him like that a hundred times in the last hour as his always questionable testimony was distilled from a barely plausible chain of events to him saying over and over, “I just knew”. Scully can’t apply science to his gut, and Mulder wishes there was some way for him to tell her that he’s lived the same day 24 times and watched her die 24 times and that all he can think right now is that she’s alive, they both are, and please, please, never let him live that Monday again.

He’d slept like the dead last night, passed out on his couch under the weight of two dozen heartbreaks, and woken convinced another was on its way. His commute had been surreal, the newspaper headlines telling him Tuesday seeming just a cruel trick, until Scully had brought reality through the basement office door, red hair and rosy cheeks telling him that it really was over. He’d wanted to hug her then, to close the distance that Diana and a thousand almost arguments have opened between them but when Scully had met his gaze, he’d realised she didn’t remember; that all those Mondays, all those desperate goodbyes as Bernard’s hand had dropped finally, fatally to that killswitch, were his burden to bear. And so he’d told Skinner, with a nonchalance betrayed only by the clench of his hands in his lap as he relived that explosion over and over again, Scully flying boneless away from him in a marble framed inferno, that he “just knew”.

When they reach the elevator, there’s a question on her lips, a “What the hell Mulder?” that he can’t answer and so he drops the curtain on his coping face and lets her see the panic. She understands. No amount of distance and dissonance in their partnership can take away six years of learning to read each other and so she doesn’t argue when he steers her out of the lift at the exit level, hand in it’s long claimed but recently deserted spot on her lower back. She doesn’t even blink when his fingers press a little harder than usual, clinging to the solidness beneath the layers of shifting fabric as if by holding tight he can drag this moment over all those impossible ones that came before, blackout the flashbacks with her constancy.

He drives them to a bar they used to frequent, a bar where he once stuck a sparkler in a snoball to mark off a year that might have been her last, and orders them both a finger more of Scotch than Scully permits on a weeknight. He sits slightly too close, in an aching silence, his eyes fixed on the gentle curve of her hand around the glass, so different from the desperate way she’d hefted her gun in so many of her last moments.

The whiskey burns him inside the same way Bernard’s fire had swept him away, and he wants to cry. He wants to tell Scully and not have her think him insane. He wants to share his nightmare but keep the darkness from her door. He wants her hands on him again, to feel her fingers on his chest and her weight against him in a moment where they are both recklessly alive, to drag her mouth to his and breathe into her, fill his lungs with her, feel her blood pump around him, bury himself inside her until there is no space, no sound but a shared heartbeat and her melting into him.

But she moves away when Mulder lets his knee rests on her leg. Just an inch but enough that he knows she doesn’t want the same things, that her mind is still puzzling out his strange behaviour. The intoxicating fingers of the liquor have not pried open the walls Scully has put up between them, and though liquid courage is reacting in his belly with three agonising weeks of losing her every day, her glass is mostly full and her eyes are cloudy with doubt. Mulder wants to tell her everything. Words tingle on his tongue; both the insane truth and all the things he tried to choke out in their final seconds, heavy four letter words and thank you and sorry and “at least we’re going together”. All that comes out is air.

And before he can try again, it’s over. His glass is empty and she’s sliding out and taking his keys, dropping him at the apartment where his floor is still three weeks wet though the leak only happened yesterday morning. She’s not meeting his eye when he takes her hand over the console and tries to squeeze some meaning into the the gentle desperation of his grip. She’s not offering to stay, to chase away her own ghost when it stands before him at 3am, holding his pay cheque and her gun on the bloodied tiles of Craddock Marine Bank and asking him why this has happened to them, why he couldn’t save her.

Wednesday dawns cold on the once comforting leather of his sofa, and for the first time since all those Mondays, Mulder goes into his bedroom. The deflated corpse of his waterbed lies shrunken in its frame and he knows how it feels. He retrieves something Armani from his closet, and straps on his sidearm and a neutral expression, arriving at the office on time for the first time on three weeks, smiling blandly at Scully’s leading “Good morning?”. In time he will forget how she looked, leaning over and begging him to live, in time he will forget how she looks when she is dying. For now he will remain upright and not tell her the truth, not about his head or his heart. He will bury himself in their work and wait until his denial becomes acceptance. It always does. 

Tomorrow acceptance will be an argument she wants to have about time travel. On Friday it will be her insistence that he have, and eat, a salad along with his burger. In three weeks time it will be her kicking him out of their “marriage bed” in Arcadia and a week after that the ease with which she slips of her wedding ring while he lingers just a little too long. But it will come, assuming that the sun keeps rising, time goes back to being a universal invariant and Mondays stay locked between Sundays and Tuesdays, far, far away from the nightmare days that exist now only in Mulder’s mind.


	12. Bad Language

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S6 - Pre Arcadia || Speed Drabble - No Beta

Scully holds her neutral expression just long enough for the condescending snick of Diana Fowley’s heels to fade to nothing, the pressure of her indignation driving her eyebrows up until they run a very real risk of vanishing  into her hairline. And as the elevator grinds upwards, she lets go.

‘UGH’.

Her fists unfurl and flick out, shoving the heavily redacted X-File Fowley deigned to share with them to the floor in a petulant slump. And it’s not enough, the knowing quirk of the other woman’s brow as left with a “tell Fox I’ll see him later”, hooking itself spitefully into Scully’s long buried jealous streak and dragging it to the surface.

‘Bitch!’ 

The word drops onto the marked wood of the desk and it tastes of rebellion. Scully smiles, shoving Mulder’s chair back into the filing cabinet with a satisfying thwack. She stalks to the back of the office, and starts crashing drawers open, delighting at the messy justice she is exacting on their shared space, each long resisted curse word blooming on her tongue in a wicked shade of green.

‘A few months back in D.C and she thinks she knows him again? Thinks she knows _me_?! As if six years can just be caught up, like that… maybe Mulder thinks it can, a man’s dick does seem to be wired directly to his idiot switch… but for fucks sake! She actually asked if it’s cold up here on my pedestal? BITCH. I’d love a fucking pedestal! Imagine that! Being in the light, being worshipped instead of the “privilege” of getting pushed face first into endless shit just to stand by him. What does she know about that? The calculating, arrogant, belittling, floozy-jezebel, daughter of a mother-fucking-BITCH’.

She slams the last drawer closed and spins into Mulder’s shadow. His mouth is slightly slack and Scully wonders how long he’s been stood there. A folder hangs open in one of his hands, pages slipping sideways in shock. He’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before. And maybe he hasn’t, he’s seen a lot of Dana Scully, M.D., he’s seen her broken, he’s seen her dying, occasionally he has seen her laughing, drunk and drowsy… but she’s not sure he’s seen her how she was when she was eighteen and reckless, her Irish high in her cheeks and her lips ripe with the very worst of Bill Scully’s vocabulary.

‘Shut your mouth Mulder’, she tells him, rescuing the folder and stepping close enough that she can hear his breath hiss past his teeth. ‘I’m a sailor’s daughter, not a nun, and goddamnit it that woman doesn’t bring out the worst in me.’

From where Mulder’s stood, he’d say maybe it brings out her best, because where the last few weeks have handed him a reluctant, resistant Scully, Fowley’s latest affront has restored her to glorious technicolour, There’s magnesium blue in the spark of her eyes, a swagger to the way she pushes past him and an unspoken dare in her voice that he is powerless to resist.

‘What did she do now?’ Mulder manages, though he doesn’t really care, he just wants to watch this foxfire Scully burn her way through their office and back to their old dynamic. Until she spins sharply, back into his space and as her gaze scorches the air between them, Mulder realises they are past the point of no return.

‘She asked’, and her red hair swings back to reveal the ferocious beauty of her face, ‘if I ever got tired of playing by the book.’ Scully’s chin juts dangerously in the direction of Mulder’s exposed throat and he swallows heavily, desperately as she runs one fingernail up his sleeve. Her touch is too light to feel but it burns, his ears burn, each syllable striking like flint and igniting his blood.

‘She said I was a “goody-goody”’ and her grip turns vicious, sharp nails punctuating the patronising insult on the hard planes of Mulder’s chest. He groans and Scully grins, teeth catching a giggle right on her lip as she feels him harden against her.

‘She said,’ and her hands wander south, lips climbing ever closer to the spot beneath his ear that will make it all fall apart. ‘that I couldn’t give you what you wanted Mulder.’

And her hands stop, an inch below his belt buckle and a breath away from salvation. His breath is ragged, every hair on his body on end and reaching for her, his cock straining for what he has only imagined and is now pressed against him, so close but still separate. Mulder wants to press himself forward, tear away these last few layers and finally be everything he has wanted to be for Scully, but she’s waiting for something, poised on the balance beam of sanity and devastation with a gymnast’s strength. Her stillness is unnatural, almond nails on his belly, raspberry lips at his throat and all waiting for him to respond. Eventually, not knowing what else to do he speaks…

‘And what did you say Scully? What did you tell her?’

And this time she laughs. 

She laughs and steps back and there’s sadness in her eyes, tainting the arousal, a bitter slant to her eyebrows as she draws professional back over the sailor-smile, smoothing out her hair and her emotions.

‘I told her that nobody can give you what you want, because even you don’t know what that is.’

By the time the blood has returned to Mulder’s brain with enough force to reason that he knows exactly what, or who, he wants Scully is gone. It takes him five minutes to gather the scattered briefing on the The Falls at Arcadia, their new identities muddled in with floor-plans and case notes, and even as he struggles to organise the file, Mulder knows that the real task is going to be working out what just happened, and how he can make it happen again but with a much better ending.


	13. Small Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S7 || Fluff || MSR || Teen

Watching from a distance, nobody but Mulder would know how uncomfortable she is in the crowded room. Scully prides herself on it. While he lurks in a corner, all but concealed behind a pillar with a warm beer and a bowl of peanuts he swiped from one of the tables, she works the room, talking and nodding in a way that makes her hair catch the light as it just barely kisses the exposed swoop of her neck. She’s wearing a dress, fitted but not tight, with skinny straps that keep threatening to roll off her shoulders when someone presses past. She’s not carrying a weapon and she smiles widely when the man next to her says something, but the brightness of her teeth never reaches her eyes.

Mulder watches her shift her weight from foot to foot, focussing on the agitated circling of her ankle instead of the slimness of her leg vanishing seductively into a glossy stiletto pump. He watches her fingers flex against her wineglass, notes her flinch almost imperceptibly when one of her circle nudges her arm too familiarly. He sees the platters of canapes whisk by just out of reach, that her glass is almost empty, and he knows her patience will be wearing thin. 

It’s taken them seven years to even start to verbalise what they mean to each other, but he has been able to read her signs from almost the very beginning. Abandoning his beer and his hiding space, Mulder makes a pitstop or two and arrives at Scully’s side just as she empties her glass.

The man next to her, from Homicide he thinks, draws breath to offer her a refill but Mulder has already staked his claim, his finger light on the snowdrop skin inside her elbow, and his head bent in closer than is normal for anyone but them.

‘Scully, we need to talk about that lead,’ he murmurs, not caring that the other Agents present will see intense, “Spooky” Mulder, spoiling his partners fun at AD Gilmore’s retirement bash.Because he sees the tiny goosebumps rising on Scully’s arm where he touches her, feels her angle towards him as if she were a compass and him true north. She makes her excuses, nervously smoothing the mossy green of her dress to hide her ruffled feelings and follows him through the crowd, his height cutting a swathe she can walk in without having to fight past everyone’s elbows. 

Some days it annoys her, the ease with which Mulder seems to carve his way in the world, but tonight she is grateful for his intervention. Scully had wanted to pay her respects to Gilmore, to show herself willing to participate in Bureau society rather than closet herself ever more intimately in the dark with Mulder, but the small talk was tedious and she could feel her partner’s eyes on her from across the room wherever she turned. She has been waiting all evening for him to object to their presence, to demand her full attention. Part of her appreciates his restraint and respect for her wish to participate in what he calls “normal person stuff,” but the rest of her wants him to rebel and drag her away from normalcy and into the strange new world that has been unfolding before them since New Year’s Eve.

When they clear the ballroom Mulder makes a hard right, pushing open a door and barely letting her through before he pushes her up against it, his hands unruly in her hair and his lips beer-malted against hers. Scully doesn’t know if anyone saw them come in here, she doesn’t know what room it is even, but she doesn’t care. The cool of the wine is burned off her tongue by the force of his need for her, there is no lead, no reason for them to leave beyond how badly she needs him, how desperately he needs her. 

Scully protests only slightly when Mulder pushes the unstable straps of her dress off her shoulders, the tightness of the bodice preventing it from falling down as his mouth whispers down her neck and into the hollow of her collarbone. He’s obsessed with the spot, with the little noise she can’t help making when he drags his teeth across her too bruisable skin and though Scully is still completely clothed she feels naked; the sensations flashing her back to the moment last weekend when he pulled her legs up to her shoulders, thrust deep and roared the pleasure of his climax into that same spot. She moans a little at the memory, at the flush of heat between her legs and the constricting tightness of the dress and Mulder pulls back amused, his hair rakish from her hands. 

‘You look perfect.’ He tells her, and then reaching over her head to a linen-laden shelf and retrieving a loaded plate of canapes. ‘I saw you eyeing the bruschetta in there.’ And though her breath is still short with desire, Scully’s stomach gives an approving growl. She doesn’t wait for Mulder to finish making a tablecloth into a makeshift picnic blanket for them, or for him to pour her more wine from the bottle he produces from behind the fire extinguisher, before she tucks in. They eat in companionable silence, her back still to the door and him opposite, close enough that their knees touch when he leans in to catch a crumb that has lingered too long on her lower lip, and when the food is gone the atmosphere is thick with unspoken questions.

They have never done this before, transitioned from public to private personas in any sort of scenario that resembles a date and for a tense moment it feels like an impossible task. And then Scully leans in, one hand on each of Mulder’s knees and brushes a light kiss, heavy with promise over his lips. 

‘Home?’

Is all she says, and it’s the answer as well as the question. It doesn’t matter where they go now, whose apartment, whose bed. What matters is that they will go there together, wake up together, face what’s next together. 

The wine is left behind with the rest of the bureau, his jacket covers her shoulders and in the silence of the cab they hold hands all the way to Georgetown.  


	14. You Said A Mouthful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S7 || Smuttish || For @leiascully and @xfficchallenges dialogue only challenge! || Mature

‘I’ve been thinking Mulder… Maybe we should start digitising our files - oh don’t look at me like that! At least hear me out before you start shouting internet conspiracy theories?’

‘Hmmm.’

‘I don’t mean the the sensitive stuff, just our reference materials. I don’t have your memory and being able to cross reference weird bite marks, unusual weapons, small towns with cannibal corporations without having to remember where they are in your crazy system - OW - you _know_  it’s crazy’

‘…’

‘Imagine how much time we’d save for… other things… if we could just tap in “giant proboscis”  and call up what we needed. How many hours we could- Mulder? No don’t stop I’m not done!’

‘Scully. My tongue can’t do this kind of delicate work when my mind is occupied with office minutiae, and my libido and the word “proboscis” don’t seem to get along. I thought you wanted me to distract you?’

‘I did! I just…’

‘Scully. Tell me you didn’t ply me with oral sex during a case just so you could try to talk me into upgrading our files?’

‘I… just figured maybe I had a better chance of finishing my pitch if you had your mouth full!’

‘ _SCULLY’_

‘Mulder. You are a paranoid stick in the mud.’

‘And _you_ are in violation of not only several FBI fraternisation guidelines, which you have previously upheld even on my birthday! Not to mention our personal rule #1 - Do not let personal relationship interfere with X-Files work.’

‘But Mulder-’

‘Uh-uh! My turn to talk now I think. I should be very hurt by your cruel misuse of my famously pouty lower lip and boyish need to please… but as I enjoyed it I think I can find it in me to forgive you.’

‘You’re a true Christian martyr Mulder.’

‘Except I only worship at the altar of Dana Scully… but I do think what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. How about you see what you can do to recover Mulder junior from his proboscis related downfall while I argue my side of the digital debate, and then afterwards we’ll see about working our way to a mutually enjoyable compromise?’

‘Hmmph.’

‘Shhh Scully. Didn’t anyone anyone ever tell you it’s rude to talk with your mouth full?’

‘You have one minute until I start biting.’

‘Hackers Scully. Technology is advancing at a -fuck! You know what? We can finish this conversation late-OH!’


	15. Marshmallows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S7 || Teen
> 
> Inspired by a whatsapp chat with @2momsmakearight this is unapologetic fluffy goo with an angst starter that takes place around the same time as Rush (aka post-Milennium kiss). This is potentially the first of three linked pieces… but we’ll see how it goes.

Mulder’s heart is pounding in his chest as he rips open the door to Scully’s building and tackles the stairs two at a time, breath wheezing past the strangled lump in his throat, deafeningly loud against the terrifying silence on the other end of the phone. He’d been hoping she might call tonight, stretched out on his sofa, half-reading their latest report, losing himself if the tight loops of her handwriting and the memory of her lips whispering over his as Auld Lang Syne played in the background. They’ve been dancing around the issue ever since, him looking for some way to bring it up and her, efficiently, endlessly, tidying away even the smallest lull in conversation to avoid any awkwardness. The end of the working week brought with it the end of such simple diversionary tactics and just as Mulder opened his mouth to suggest dinner Scully had countered with a girls night out with some college friend in town for the weekend and rushed from the room. And so Mulder went home, popped a beer, considered doing some laundry and then crashed out on the couch to mull over everything that had happened. Or perhaps it would be more accuracy to say everything that hadn’t happened. 

He was just pondering what would be a plausible time to find himself in her neighbourhood on a Saturday morning and what his excuse for showing up should be, when his phone rang. Mulder grinned. He let it sound four times before grabbing it off the floor, he hadn’t wanted to seem desperate but his giddy anticipation crashed to the pit of his stomach at what he heard.

Harsh ragged breathing, a shattering sound and then Scully’s voice in an anguished ‘No! Stop it, don’t do this!’ before the unmistakable sound of her handset hitting something hard and sliding to the floor. Mulder sat frozen for ten horrible seconds, ears straining for any sign of what was happening before his voice bubbled back into his mouth and adrenaline spiked him into motion. 

‘Scully!’ His voice blasted down the silent phone-line as he shoved his feet into sneakers and ran for his car. He drove the midnight streets at lunatic speed, one hand wrenching the wheel around corners and the other clutching his cell to his ear like a lifeline, hoping for some sound that would tell him she was alright and fearing the shot or scream or last rattling breath that would change his life forever. He doesn’t remember parking, doesn’t remember anything beyond the strangled sob the thought he heard right before the crash. It occurs to him that he should have called the police, called an ambulance but he couldn’t without hanging up and he couldn’t risk not hearing something important. He couldn’t let go yet.

The sight of Scully’s apartment door slightly open chills him and he throws the door wide, struggling for his weapon before he is brought to a standstill by a spreading pool of something dark creeping out from behind her kitchen island. The source is not visible. The streetlights throw bars of light across the wooden floor, marking off each staggering step he takes until he rounds the counter and his knees buckle.

Scully is sprawled across her kitchen tiles, limbs tossed haphazardly and a huge dark stain soaking into the cotton of her pajama bottoms. The diffused light catches on ragged shards of glass near her hand and the sharp white peaks of her shoulder blades are marked only by the slim straps of her bra. Her hair covers her eyes, cheek flush to the floor and full lips parted but still. 

Numbness looms in Mulder’s chest, his cellphone slipping from useless fingers as he doubles over, forcing his way forward through the impending wave of grief to touch her one last time. She’s still warm, her skin dewey and soft under his tentative hands. He’s waited years to touch her like that and now it’s too late. He wonders if it would be strange to kiss her, to run his fingers from her pulse point into her hair and say goodbye to her, hope and love and everything else they almost had. As his fingers reach the proud column of her neck he decides he doesn’t care, he is ready to give up and crumble at her side… until he feels a flutter under his fingers. And another. She stirs, stretching, groaning and her eyes flicker open. 

‘Mulder?’ Scully’s voice is husky and low, confusion and something else darting through the blue of her eyes. ‘Why’re you crying - why’re we in my kitchen?’

He hadn’t realised he was crying, hadn’t realised he was shaking. Relief sweeps through him and his knees finally give, crumpling to the floor beside Scully who has propped herself on one elbow and is gazing dazedly around her kitchen, before looking back at him for an explanation. Mulder just shakes his head and tries to remember how to breathe evenly. Scully is not dead. Scully is not dead. He chants it silently until his head clears and he can start to function normally again.

He tries to work out what could possibly have happened, when he hears a crackling noise and looks over to see Scully rolling on to her side, cringing slightly at the movement and finding the source of the noise. A bag of giant marshmallows, caught between her body and the floor. They regard them with utter confusion, him collapsed back on her cupboard doors and her dragging uncooperative limbs into a sitting position.She appears uninjured but hesitant to move quickly and Mulder is totally perplexed. Did she faint? He’d ask but Scully looks as spaced out as he feels.

And then it hits her, Mulder watches Scully’s eyes widen with memory and then she’s curling herself into a ball, pressing her forehead into her knees and rocking herself, a soft chant of ‘Oh dear god no!’

He’s at her side in an instant, pulling her away from the broken glass and into the safety of his arms. She fits perfectly, but doesn’t relax, shrinking slightly from the soothing circles he makes on her bare back and buries his face in her hair. And that’s when he smells it.

Alcohol. Scully usually smells of vanilla, laundry powder and her own Scully-ish scent. But tonight she smells of tequila. Or maybe whiskey, with a touch of cigarette smoke. His usually fragrant partner smells like Friday night at a seedy bar. And things start dropping into place.

Mulder drops his hand to the wet, dark mark on her calf and squeezes until a droplet lands on his finger. He raises it to eye level over her ducked head and then sniffs it before popping the finger in his mouth. Red wine. Probably Merlot.

‘Scully…’, he keeps his voice soft, caressing and tries not to laugh with relief at such a simple explanation for the hour he has just spent in hell. ‘Are you drunk?’ and he feels a small nod brush the underneath of his chin before he loses his battle with laughter. Relief bursts out of him as a rumbling chuckle, shaking his chest and her with it with increasing violence, until his eyes are once again streaming and he can no longer hold on to her. The more he thinks about it, how terrified he was, how convinced he had been that she was dead, the funnier it gets. When he finally gathers himself she has slid from his lap and is looking at him reproachfully, wincing slightly at the volume of his mirth and still holding her wine-soaked knees to her chest in what he now recognises as an attempt to cover her state of undress.  

Noticing goosebumps rising on her naked arms and feeling the seeping chill of the tiles Mulder unfolds himself and, flicking on a sidelight, retrieves the blanket from the back of the couch before returning to drape it over her shoulders. He gently tugs her to her feet. Scully wobbles and he steadies her, weaving them both across to the couch where she collapses, boneless and unfocused.  Knowing she will kill him in the morning if there is a stain on her upholstery he squats and grabs the ankles of her pajama bottoms, pulling firmly until the elastic pops over her hips under the cover of her blanket and the ruined garment slides down her legs. When he pulls them over her ankles they tangle on one foot and in her inebriated state, the force is enough to topple Scully groaning onto a horizontal heap on the seat. Fighting back another giggle Mulder deposits the wet fabric in the kitchen sink and after rummaging for painkillers in a drawer, fills a glass of water and returns to his stricken partner.

Scully is watching him with a tragi-curious expression on her face, like she has questions to ask but it pains her to even think of them. He settles at her side, delighting at the closeness even as her whiskey-sour odour fills his head, pulling her back to a sitting position, supporting her with his body and feeding her the pills and big gulps of water. 

‘Tell me what happened,’ he begs. ‘This isn’t… well it’s not like you.’ And he feels her flinch a little, whether at his assessment or the idea of telling her story he can’t tell. Whichever it is, she begins to speak, the alcohol knocking the crisp corners off her words as they tumble free in a boozy stream.

‘I haven’t seen Shell - Michelle, since…. oh… well ages. 94 maybe? She moved to Florida - why do people move to Florida Mulder? Alligators and humidity and all that bad schtu-stuff…. anyway. We went to a bar, the food was _terrible_  so I didn’t eat it - but then wine… so much wine, And then there was a man with the bottle? The one with the cork and he sh-said we should have shots and it was fun!  Burn-y kinda shots fun. But then I didn’t, did _not_ want to date him or kish -kiss him and M-shell said he was good looking but I told her - I _told_  her that he wasn’t Mulder and no. So we got a cab. A white one… I think. Juan? Or someone? I don’t remember…. and then I was going to call you and tell you… well I don’t know what. Something important about your face I think…but then I realised it’s _late_ and people sleep at night , except not you always but shh.. shouldn’t assume on a Friday so I didn’t ring but the phone was loud and I thought I’d get some wine and then…’ Scully tails off confused… ‘I don’t remember what happened next.’

‘Well… there was a loud crash… if that helps?’ Mulder offers.

‘How’d you know that?’ Scully lifts her head from where it’s been lolling on his shoulder, her words humming through his body like morning coffee. 

‘You rang me!’ He answers.

‘I did not!’ Scully’s eyebrows rise to the peak of disbelief and then drop, suddenly in horrified realisation. ‘Oh god I did! I changed my mind but then my fingers were to too clumsy to stop it…. and then I knocked the wine over but it kept ringing so I… I think I just threw the handset somewhere…’ she hunches her shoulders and covers her face with her free hand, bending under the weight of her embarrassment. Mulder scans the room and sure enough, washed up against the skirting board by the bedroom door is the unlucky phone. It looks to still be in one piece.

‘You know you shouted something when you rang me?’ The fear that Mulder had felt in those awful seconds is now just an aching memory, outweighed by the curiosity of what she might have meant.

‘WhaddidIsay?’ Scully’s words are muffled by her posture and he pulls her in close to him, unfurling her gently and starting the rub some of the tension out of the back of her neck.

‘You shouted “No! Stop it, don’t do this!”, before you threw the phone.’ Mulder feels rather than sees her swallow hard, the catch in her breath at having let something slip.

‘I-uh -uhm was… talking to the phone. Telling it off…f-for ringing loudly. Or maybe the glass of wine I broke, to stop it spreading on the floor?’ She is lying. Mulder knows she is lying. The alcohol has washed away more than Scully’s inhibitions, her defences are down too and for once he can tell what she really means, even when it''s different to what she says, even when she doesn’t want him to. But he doesn’t push it any further. Not yet.

‘I still don’t get how you ended up on the floor lying on a bag of marshmallows?’ and at this a deep blush spreads from Scully’s hidden cheeks down her neck and up into her hairline. 

‘Oh god!’ She whimpers. ‘Please don’t make me tell you!’

‘I thought you were dead! What could be worse than that!’ Mulder’s curiosity is piqued and realising that he is not going to let this one go, Scully shudders a little and gingerly pulls herself to her feet. wobbling across the floor to retrieve the bag of marshmallows and twirls tipsily back to face him. Her eyes are bright and somehow dangerous, her hair a tangled inferno.

‘I broke a glass and I needed to… the brush and pan thingy. But I couldn’t stand up so I was crawling. I don’t normally see my cupboards from that angle. And I found these -’ she holds the red plastic packet up at eye level and gives it a dramatic shake. ‘When did I last eat a marshmallow Mulder?’ Another shake and he opens his mouth to assert his ignorance but she rambles on. ‘Rhetorical - I _don’t_  eat marshamallows. Except in ice-cream. These-’ another shake, ‘belonged to Ethan.’

‘Ethan?’ Mulder doesn’t remember an Ethan… 

‘ _Ethan_ , was my last boyfriend. Before the X-Files. Before running about in forests and ruining all my good shoes. Before whatever this’ she gestures between them violently, ‘started out. These marshmallows and I have lived together for longer than I have ever sustained a relationship! And they’re not even out of date! I should marry these marshmallows!’ This time when she shakes the bag the folded top comes open and puffy white mallows rain down on the carpet. ‘Shit!’ Scully shouts and collapses next to them, grabbing them up and piling them in her blanket covered lap. ‘I’m sorry mallows! I didn’t mean to!’ 

She sighs and pops one in her mouth, closing her eyes as the sugar coats her teeth and then talking thickly around the dissolving sweet. ‘So I found the marshmallows and then I was too tired and sad to move from the floor. So I just stayed there. And then you were here Mulder. Just like always. Here but not here. Seven years and all I have is you and the marshmallows.’

Scully has never looked so small as she does now, swaddled in a huge blanket, nursing a lapful of childhood treats. She regards them sorrowfully, before adding without meeting his eyes, ‘I don’t even have all of you, Mulder.’

He starts at that, surging from his seat to cross to where she sits, dropping to his knees before her and clasping her cheeks in his hands, drawing her face up until their eyes lock. 

‘You have all of me Scully. Every last piece. Every cell and moment and broken part and crazy idea is yours.’ Mulder pours all the love he has never found an adequate way to express into his stumbling confession, willing her to hear him.

But Scully shakes her head. ‘I know I’m your best friend, I know we share most everything but - I want… I want…I can’t have what I want.’ her eyes flutter shut under the intensity of his gaze and she tries to turn away but he hold her in place, refusing to let this honest moment pass without a confession from them both.

‘Tell me what you want Scully and I will give it to you in a heartbeat’. 

She takes a deep breath. And then opens her eyes, a clear, blue honesty that goes straight to his core. 

Mulder… I want you like…. like New Years’, and then she lets go of the blanket and it slithers to her waist, pooling decadently around the sensual curve that is Scully, almost bare and inches away from him, a living, breathing version of his wildest fantasies. Mulder tries not to stare at the sliver of rose that peeks over the lace edge of her bra, tries not to imagine tasting the dusting of freckles that hopscotch a winding path from her throat to her cleavage. Forcing himself away he takes her hands and answers her question, his voice crackling with desire and the triumph of a finally realised dream.

‘I want that too. I’m yours. I always have been.’ 

Scully’s eyes widen and Mulder leans in to claim her lips, to restart the year how it should have gone after their shaky first try. He’s close enough to taste the marshmallow on her breath when her eyes drift out of focus, roll back and she pitches forward into him, unconscious. Gathering up his small, inebriated partner Mulder carries her to her bedroom, taking in the explosion of clothes and towels that litter her usually pristine space as he folds her tenderly between soft sheets, laid out in the recovery position just to be safe. Toeing off his shoes he stretches out on top of the covers, thanking Ethan, whoever the hell he was, for that forgotten bag or marshmallows and the conversation they inspired.

It’s getting light by the time Mulder drifts off and the last thing he sees as his eyes flutter shut is the gentle rise and fall of his partners chest, the subtle thump of her heart matching his own, beat for beat.


	16. Graham Crackers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning after the events of Marshmallow.

There is a moment of peace before the memories and sensations of the night before set back in. In that grace period, Scully stretches, yawns and then jolts upright as her carelessly thrown hand connects with something warm and breathing on the other side of her bed. Hard.

‘OW!’ Mulder’s startled yelp at his rude awakening breaches the silence and shoots a needle of pain straight to her temples where it joins the gathering throb of a night spent on the wrong side of four shots of tequila. Scully opens her mouth to apologise and then just as quickly clamps it shut, clapping the same hand that just woke her partner over her lips and desperately windmilling her legs free of the sheets as the headache transitions rapidly into a wave of nausea.

Her legs are liquid across the floor, crashing her into her bureau and the door frame as she half falls, half dashes for the bathroom, vaguely aware of Mulder’s concerned voice at her heels. The light reflecting off the white tiles is painfully bright but that discomfort is forgotten when her forehead meets porcelain and everything shrinks to the pain behind her eyeballs and the violent expulsion of last nights bad decisions into the toilet,

As the retching subsides she becomes gradually aware of something cool on the back of her neck and warm hands, one holding her hair gently away from her face and the other marking feather-light whorls down her exposed vertebrae. It feels nice and if she didn’t feel so disgusting, Scully would probably lean back and enjoy it, revelling in the sensation of Mulder’s hands finally on her bare skin. But all she can manage is a whimper and an “I’m sorry” that only half croaks its way free of her ravaged throat. Mulder hums very softly and his hands keep soothing away the ragged edges of the nausea, the warmth of his chest drawing closer as sleep creeps back into the edges of her vision. And when she starts to nod against the arm stretched over the toilet seat, she feels her partner scoop her boneless form up off the cold tiles and carry her away. Something in the back of her head tells her that she shouldn’t be curling into him, that tucking her nose into the cotton-soft fold of his collarbone is somehow forbidden but as sleep claims her she gives up the fight and settles against him.

* * *

Mulder marvels at how small Scully seems asleep in his arms. Perhaps it’s the hangover-white shade of her skin or the lack of clothes that makes her seem so tiny, so vulnerable, but whatever it is he feels a wave of fierce protectiveness that surprises him. Mulder can’t think of another time she has let him look after her in a non-life-threatening situation and he’s not sure exactly how to process the cycling waves of love, concern, pride that she’s letting him in and frustration that there’s nothing he can do to stop her from feeling her self-inflicted pain. Tucking her back in bed, he steps back and wonders how she can still be so beautiful. Offer him the world’s sexiest woman and he’d still choose hungover Scully, clammy, drooling and tousled on last night’s sheets. As if sensing his tender thoughts she stirs in protest at the saccharine, grunting and throwing an arm and a leg across on to his side of the bed. It’s what she does best and she does it without meaning to, somehow without guile or intent she spreads her Scully-ness into everything she comes near, taking over every situation, every thought with the strength of her character. She consumed every spare space in Mulder’s life years ago, made herself at home in his his heart and his head without him realising until it was far too late, until all he had left was her and the fear that he might never mean to her what she had come to mean to him.

Perhaps today that fear will be laid to rest, full stops finally dropped at the end of the run on sentences of New Years Eve, the bee in the corridor and last night’s tipsy honesty. But first she needs to sleep and Mulder needs to pee, an urge that is rapidly complicated his body’s reaction to Scully wriggling slightly and the clinging fabric of her panties riding the cream curve of her ass.

Not the time. He bites back his arousal and leaves her to rest, riffling through her regimented cupboards to start a pot of coffee before busying himself with cleaning up the carnage of the night before. In his own apartment, cleaning is a necessary evil, but somehow doing it here, doing it to save Scully the trouble and discomfort of reliving her drunken tumble, it feels natural and worthwhile. Without meaning to Mulder slips into a sort of daydream where this is his every Saturday morning, Scully sleeping in while he potters about, setting things to rights so they can start their weekend together without a clash between her compulsive neatness and his natural carelessness. In the daydream the messes are mostly his and occasionally theirs; his shoes relocated to the entryway, his papers stacked neatly on the coffee table and the relics of what started as takeout on the couch, bickering over the last wonton and ends up with them naked on the rug, the wonton smooshed into the floorboards as Mulder finds a more interesting employment for his mouth than eating.

He drifts in the simple fantasy until the apartment is shipshape and then finds an excuse to go in and check on Scully, half-walking her to slump sleep-heavy against him as he feeds her painkillers and a glass of water and settles her back down. She reaches for him as she slips back off to sleep but he drags himself away. Once the hangover has passed, the legacy of last night needs to be them actually talking to one another, and for that to happen, Mulder needs to keep a hold of himself.

* * *

When Scully next wakes up the pounding in her head has diminished to a dull buzz and a foul taste in her mouth. Shuddering at the staleness of every inhale, she levers herself out of bed and creeps across the floor. She vaguely remembers being here last night in a tempest of discarded outfits but there is no evidence of a mess, her wardrobe doors are closed and her shoes are lined up neatly beside it. Outwardly, everything appears to be exactly as she would expect but she knows on some instinctive level that something has shifted, something far bigger than a pair of shoes or the feeling that someone has reached down her throat and rearranged her internal organs. Scully remembers what it is as she reaches the door and sees Mulder, tucked in the corner of her couch with a coffee as though he’s always belonged there. When he realises she’s there and meets her gaze something in her chest contracts hard. Mulder’s eyes are saying that he does belong there, that he belongs to her. Unable to stand it, she flees to the bathroom.

The scalding heat of the shower cuts through the last of the fog surrounding the night before and a series of images swim into unflinching focus. Scully scrubs her eyes, willing certain moments to dissolve into the unreality of her tequila nightmare but instead they play in an inescapable loop. She remembers her phone sailing through the air as she tried to push away how badly she wanted to hear Mulder’s voice, his face emerging from the darkness, tearstained and terrified. She can still feel the comforting shell his arms made around her as she cried and the look, raw and real, that had met her clumsy confession of everything she was missing. She shudders at the realisation  that that moment of truth ended with her losing consciousness, cringes at the knowledge that Mulder’s first experience of her in underwear centred round a bout of violent retching and is only slightly comforted by his still being there. While the hopeful part of her remembers the meaning in his morning greeting, the skeptic begins to wonder if he isn’t just being his usual overprotective self, refusing to leave her alone until he’s satisfied that the unflappable Agent Scully he depends on is fully charged and ready to leap into his next hare-brained scheme.

By the time she’s clean, dry and brushing the last tang of nausea off her teeth, Scully has reasoned away all of Mulder’s actions as those of a concerned friend and colleague and come up with some passable excuses to defuse the awkwardness of her meltdown. The only upside of her hangover is that she can quite legitimately pretend not to remember anything and the last twelve hours can slip easily into the drawer where they hide all the other things they don’t talk about.

Wrapping herself firmly in her robe and tightening the belt around her resolve, Scully emerges from the bathroom ready to thank Mulder for his concern and send him on his way. She dismisses the hollow pang in her belly as another symptom of the hangover and absolutely nothing to do with watching Mulder leave again.

Her good intentions immediately hit a snag when she finds her partner gone from his spot on the couch. He’s not in the kitchen either and in a sickening moment she realises Mulder has left, satisfied that she is in no immediate danger, he has walked away from her without so much as a goodbye… Scully bites back a sigh. It’s what she wanted, isn’t it? Another pang of loss ripples through her and she makes another excuse, ready to scold herself for such an irrational reaction to a scenario only slightly different to what she herself had planned. Somehow the thought of Mulder leaving on his own is much harder to swallow than her making him leave. The latter would be a sensible resolution to an awkward situation, so why does the former feel like a loss?

A muffled curse from her bedroom shatters the thought.

Crossing the room in short, indignant strides, she arrives at the doorway ready to tell her partner to get out of her room and back to his own apartment. The words die on her lips as she sees him hopping slightly as he drags clean sheets over the bare mattress of her bed. Judging by his stance he’s just discovered the unexpected middle leg of her bed, the immovable demise of many of her pedicures and Scully has to bite her lip to keep from smiling at the sight of her scruffy, undomestic partner fudging his way through a last hospital corner. He’s dragged the already refreshed comforter back on to the bed and is wrestling pillows into clean slips when he notices her watching.

‘You don’t have to do that Mulder’, is her first pass of the morning, her voice a soft husk of it’s usual timbre. At the unexpected sound his eyes flash dark for a second and then a blush spreads across his cheeks and he looks away, hands nervously working the pillow in front of him.

* * *

Mulder had hoped to have the bed made up before Scully was done in the bathroom, to vanish the dirty sheets into the washer before she was dressed and in doing so remove any distractions from the conversation he hoped so desperately to have. The flash of fear in her eyes when she’d emerged blearily from her slumber, her rapid retreat into the bathroom at his unspoken question, that was all it took to dissolve his Saturday daydreams and push him back into the familiar territory of uncertainty and half-told truths. In reconstructing her bedroom he had been preparing himself to have to fight to stop Scully from denying last night ever happened. He’d do anything to prove by his actions that he could be what she needed, that he belonged here in her sanctuary, that he belonged in every part of her life. And once again she had surprised him. The throaty rasp of her voice was as unfamiliar to him as the expression in her eyes, somewhere between soft and hard, between acceptance and question. Mulder looks up and finds her still watching him with that same strange look, wet hair clinging slickly to the planes of her face and dressed only in the robe from the back of the bathroom door. He wants her so badly, even like this, uncertain and with more unfinished business between them than he knew was possible. He clears his throat to stop a lump forming, digging his nails into his palms under the guise of arranging the pillows to discourage any sort of response in his groin to Scully’s proximity and with one last pillow sheathed, finishes his task. Dragging the hamper back to its spot, Mulder sets the last out-of-place thing to right, returning Scully’s apartment to it’s pre-bender orderliness.

Now all that is left is the hard stuff. Putting whatever it is that has gone wrong between them right, finding a way around the black holes of silence that prevent either of them from saying what they really mean without mind altering substances or imminent death to loosen their tongues. Mulder collects Scully at the door, clasping her hand in a way that feels both familiar and terribly, terribly intimate as his knuckles brush the soft towelling robe, and pulls her gently to the living room.

Putting her back where she was last night when she began her confession he passes her a cup of coffee and a box of graham crackers he found in the back of her cupboard, they weren’t saltines but they would do. She wrinkles her nose.

‘You have to eat something Scully, especially if you want to take more headache pills in an hour’, Mulder reasons, and the doctor in her acquiesces and dutifully starts to nibble at a cracker. Missing the reassurance of her hand in his, Mulder takes a deep breath and a risk, closing the distance between them and sliding his arm behind her along the back of the couch. Scully stiffens, her knuckles whitening around the belly of the mug and he almost loses his nerve. For a moment she draws breath as if to speak but then thinks better of it. Mulder has started this and for once it seems his argumentative partner is going to let him continue uninterrupted. He finds the victory is a hollow one, adding to his doubts instead of conviction that this will end how he hopes. Marooned in the silence and unable to make eye contact, unwilling to pull her closer if it’s truly not what she wants, Mulder stills.

There is no going back from this.

He could give them both the get-out-of-jail-free card of her drunkenness, avoid mentioning what happened and let her decide whether to bring it up. He has toyed with the thought. But that unknown expression, that flash of doubt he’d seen in her eyes when she ran from him earlier… he can’t let that cost them another day. It’s already been too long. He counts a heartbeat, and another, as the tension in the room thickens to something suffocating and forces his question out on a desperate puff of air.

‘Scully’, he manages, tongue clumsy at this critical moment, ‘This is where we were last night when you told me… when you told me what happened. About wanting the guy at the bar to be me.’ She still doesn’t respond, he can almost see her listening, lips poised at the edge of the cup, cracker hovering in midair, as though his inelegant outburst has frozen normality in this midway moment. They are not used to speaking frankly about matters outside of their work. Personal exchanges are always cloaked in nuance and punctuated with meaningful gazes, neither of them willing to risk it all on the brutal, dangerous simplicity of a direct approach. Until now.

Mulder points across at the spot on the floor where she had fallen apart and Scully inhales audibly.

‘And that Scully… that is where you were when you told me that you wanted what we had on New Year’s Eve to be real. And where I tried to tell you that I was all yours. That I wanted it too.’ He pauses, trying to regulate his breath and control the tremble in his voice only to realise that under his arm, Scully is shaking too. Part of him instantly begins to analyze what that means and he crushes it, knowing that whatever the outcome there will be plenty of time later to dissect every word. Right now he has to finish before he loses his nerve or his chance.

‘Scully’, he murmurs her name like a prayer and finally she inclines her head slightly towards him so he can see the side of her face, see he pulse in her jaw race with either anticipation or fear. Mulder knows this silence, this is Scully gathering her thoughts, sharpening them for a precise and efficient delivery of the facts as she sees them. He knows he’s running out of time to say what he means without her reasoning it all away. The pause stretches back through seven years of missed chances and then snaps, releasing a tumble of words.

‘I know this morning isn’t the best time. I know you probably feel terrible, that you probably have a lot of questions about last night and why I’m still here but I can’t wait anymore. I can’t wonder anymore. And whatever your answer is I swear to you that I will respect it and go on with our partnership in whatever form you decide is best. But Scully…’

He hesitates. Neither of them breathe.

‘I…. I’m in love with you Scully. And if you want what you said you wanted last night then I’m all in. And I just need you to know that before you start rationalising last night into meaning less than it did. As messy and unexpected as it was, it meant everything to me. And if you want me Scully…. Well… I’m yours’.

Mulder’s words dissolve into a heavy silence, broken only by the gentle thud of a long forgotten graham cracker slipping from Scully’s fingers and landing in the strained space between them.


	17. Pink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S8 || Teen  
> An alternate final flashback for Per Manum.. because Mulder and Scully deserved better.

The pounding at Mulder’s door is deafening in its insistence as he stumbles from the couch to the peephole. Past the shuddering ring of brass he sees a flash of red hair, a sliver of pale forehead and then he’s grappling the chain loose and tugging Scully inside. She’s never knocked like this before.

Staggering into his space she shoves a paper bag into his hand before sitting down hard about three feet away from the sofa. She’s trembling, drowning in a puffy jacket with the telltale satin of her pajama bottoms sticking out below. Mulder feels sick. Something is terribly wrong. The recent months have been hard and Scully has responded by becoming even more restrained than usual, refusing to laugh at his cohabitation flirtations in Arcadia or forgive him his long abandoned cyber flirtation with Karin Berquist. So to see her like this, undone and out of control on his floor, is terrifying. Mulder stands frozen in place, trying to work out what to do until Scully pants out.

‘Look inside.’

Mulder had forgotten about the bag, and in the minute he’s been holding it has managed to reduce to top to a sweaty, balled-up mess. It takes him thirty seconds to open it and another thirty to process what’s inside. As he fumbles, Scully’s agitation grows. He can feel her gaze boring into him as he reaches into the paper sack and pulls out the contents.

‘Well?!’ Scully’s voice is as crumpled as the paper. ‘What does it say?’

Mulder looks down at the three pregnancy tests in his hands. He’d thought she was going to the doctors on Monday. He’d been dreading it. The last judgement on a last chance.

‘Well?!’ She’s crying now. Sobbing around the edges of her words. Hope and helplessness drawing her knees to her chest as he continues to stare at the tests. 

‘It’s pink Scully,’ he whispers. ‘Why is it pink?’ and then she’s on her feet and in his space, grasping at the tiny sticks and staring at each pink, positive window. And then there’s laughter in her tears and wet eyes pressed into his shoulder and Mulder’s heart is pounding so hard it almost hurts. This time when his knees give they both end up on the floor, knotted together in a joyous approximation of the little bundle of their tangled genes, now dividing quietly in Scully’s womb. As he pulls her to him, kissing her forehead and smoothing the tangle of her hair Mulder can’t tell if the moisture on his cheeks is from his tears or hers but he doesn’t care, from now on all those things will be theirs to share. They’ve spent so long preparing for disaster, waiting for the worst and finally, unbelievably, their luck has changed. 

This now is their truth. This is their miracle.


	18. Casket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Ep Drabble for This Is Not Happening. for @txf-fic-chicks post-ep challenge. TW: death

How do you pick out a casket for half of your heart?

The showroom is a cool magnolia box of suffocating lilies and too shiny boxes that can’t possibly hope to contain everything Mulder was to her. Her mother’s hand is too heavy on her arm, the mortician’s voice is too heavy on her ears…air is too heavy in her lungs. Scully hadn’t known it could feel like this. Grief. She had mourned her father, cried for Melissa but this was new.

This wasn’t tears and lists of moments they would never share. This was as if in an instant someone had scooped away her entire being, leaving only a thin layer of skin that somehow held her shape around the emptiness within.

And she isn’t empty. Somewhere under all the ache and the parts of herself that were zipped into a black bag with her partner, her lover, is a life. The last living part of him. She wishes she could feel that now; some flutter of hope that might start a sympathetic beat in the the knot of muscle that used to be her heart.

She wonders if the baby knows it is in a coffin. That where there used to be a person around it, there is now only skin, a hollow thing surrounding something Mulder had loved, something that had died with him. She hopes it doesn’t. It’s the only thing she hopes for.

Maggie’s lips are moving, beckoning her to a simple wooden box, lined with something tan coloured. Scully touches it because she’s supposed to and it’s Mulder’s cheek, five-o-clock shadow coarse in her hand as he steals a kiss in the parking lot stairwell and then it’s only fabric again.

She thinks they’re asking if she wants to see him, to pick out an outfit and her

‘NO’ 

is the loudest noise she’s made since she knelt in that house where hope disappeared into the sky. It shocks her, shakes her, shakes her mother and the magnolia faced man who just wants to sell her a coffin, and then she runs.

She runs through caskets and carnations and swingdoors until she finds herself at the car, breath tearing out of her lungs and her eyes painfully dry. She wants to cry but she can’t. She wants to see him but she mustn’t. She knows if she does she will give up that last millimetre of skin and vanish, climb into the coffin with him and stay there until they are both dust.

Later, when her mother gently lays the catalogue in front of the chair where she’s sat unmoving for an hour, Scully picks out the casket she’d choose for herself. Mulder may lie in it alone, but both of them died the day he fell from the sky.


	19. Poughkeepsie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S8 || Fluff/Humour || First line prompt

“You know, Fox, I never really thought I’d live to see this day”, said Maggie, though she doesn’t sound angry as he’d expected her to. Six inches too far away on the overstuffed couch Scully is inspecting her knuckles with apparent interest, avoiding both her mother’s eye and Mulder’s plea for help. If she’d just look at him, just for a second… but Maggie is speaking again and stretching a respectful smile over the urge to grit his teeth Mulder meets her accusation.

‘You’re sitting on my sofa in sweatpants, telling me that you talked my only living daughter, who is eight months pregnant with a child she _still_  wont tell me the gender of, into eloping with you. To _Poughkeepsie?’_

The Scully stare on her face burns the air Mulder tries to draw to answer in the affirmative, and he grasps for something that could possibly make her understand, even though he himself now can’t make sense of why they did it. Why Poughkeepsie? And then there’s a small hand in his and calm flows behind it, Scully’s ring just slightly cooler than her fingers as she anchors him to her side. This was why they’d done it. The long road back from some nothing case he’d taken to keep them safe and close to home, Scully’s hand in his, both rested on the breathing bump of their child at a rest stop outside of Poughkeepsie. The biggest question Mulder would ever ask had slipped out as easily as an exhale, and she’d smiled her answer as if nothing else made sense. The universe had lined up that one perfect moment, and it had carried them to the courthouse and then home to a lifetime of wedding nights. Mulder still can’t believe he’s allowed to touch her at all, let alone sleep at her side.

But the honeymoon ended on a 4am realisation.

‘My mom is going to kill us!’ Scully had said, her sudden outburst waking the baby who has spent the six hours since performing nervous cartwheels on her bladder. And so Mulder had agreed he’d do it, for better or worse, lining up another disappointment for the Scully matriarch and driving them both over as early as is acceptable. No point in prolonging the inevitable. He wishes now he’d at least got dressed, or taken his ring off before Maggie had seen it at the front door and demanded an explanation. Mulder breathes deeply, catching a comforting wisp of Scully’s scent and is preparing a defense when Maggie interrupts.

‘Can I at least plan a blessing?’ Her voice is softer now, and when Mulder looks up he sees her eyes locked on his and Scully’s entwined hands, a small smile echoing the way her daughter has curled into his side. ‘I gave up on a white wedding years ago, I just can’t quite believe you both finally realised what the rest of us worked out in 1997.’ 

And then Scully’s scrambing for her feet, Mulder’s hands clumsy on her ass as she fights the bump’s gravity and then there’s hugging and crying, and all those ridiculous wedding emotions that he’d never thought he’d get to see on Scully’s face are making his eyes water and this, _this_ , is what it feels like to have a family.


	20. Last Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S9 Post Trust No1 || MSR || Angst

They shouldn’t have risked it but they had, weeks of careful planning for a stolen moment and then it all fell apart on a station platform. He sometimes wonders if he dreamed her face, starry bright and desperate as he flew past, and threw the last pieces of his heart at her retreating figure. 

He shouldn’t have risked calling her, but he had to. Two syllables to bring him home, Scully hangs in his silence, hopeful and helpless and he imagines her clutching the phone to her ear, William sleeping next door and he aches to be there.

‘Mulder?’ the second time she says his name there is a nervousness, a worry and though he has no right to soothe her, not today, he says the only thing he can think of. The only thing he ever really thinks of when he curls into the seat of his car to sleep or drives across another dusty state line.

‘Scully.’

It’s nothing.

It’s enough. She’s been everything for so long now and being away, even though it’s for her, is like living with his lungs outside his body. He can still breathe but it feels wrong, everything is harder and he bites his lip until it bleeds, tasting dust and regret, in an effort not to break down.

‘We can’t do this any more Scully,’ he tells her. And she thinks he means the phone call, the railway rendezvous and so she acquiesces.

‘We were unlucky. We can plan better. And next time I’m coming for good, I can’t live like this Mulder, I… _We_ need you. I can’t breathe Mulder.’

And from halfway across the country she is still his perfect opposite, knows exactly what he means even when he doesn’t say it. And she’s still talking, her voice rising from a whisper to a murmur and her words fill him with reckless joy.

‘I’m going to speak to the Gunmen, get them to make William and me papers, find a way out and then we’re coming to you. Even running would be better than this, safer than this. I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes…’

‘Scully-’ Mulder begins to objects, to cut off her fragile hopes with the weight of what he has to do but she won’t stop, she wont save herself, even now when all is lost.

‘I love you Mulder. **I want you more than I care about the consequences**. We’re safer together, all three of us. I don’t trust anyone but you.’

In that last split second, Mulder find salvation in her words, the blessing of Scully’s trust, her love and her faith in him reminding him of the man he so briefly was. That man who was a father and her lover, who had a future and a mission in life. The man who died the day he left her. What is left can’t be what Scully needs What she deserves.

‘That was what I was afraid of Scully. I can’t let you risk yourself for me. William needs you, and I need you to be okay for him. And that’s why-’ he loses his nerve, the words choking him as she tries to dodge the blow.

‘Mulder? No! You can’t-’

‘Goodbye Scully.’

He hangs up and leaves the phone on the floor when it falls from his hand. Later, when he finally remembers how to move, how to be, when he convinces his limbs to work together around the wreckage of his heart, he leaves the phone, message light blinking, on the side of the road.

Scully finds it two days later, dust choked and battery dead, all trace of his tyre tracks ripped away by the desert winds along with her hopes.

She cries until the wind burns her face and then turns back to Washington. She promises herself that won’t cry again until it’s over. She pulls over, blind with grief before the Arizona border.


	21. 3AM

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 9 || Post William || PG

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t deal with this right now.’ 

It’s been four minutes since she last spoke, to say hello, and the therapist catches Scully with her eyes as she tries to gather her stuff to leave.

‘Miss Scully. I know this is a difficult time for you, but I-’

‘Do you?’ Scully cuts her of with two brutal syllables, her knuckles whitening around the handle of her briefcase. ‘Do you really know how “difficult” this time is for me Dr Hansard?’ And though the therapist starts to reply, now that the words have loosened in Scully’s throat, there is no stopping them pouring forth, drowning any offer of help as they fill the room.

‘Do you know what you were doing last night at 3am Doctor? Or how about last Friday at 3am. Or last year? 1997? What were you doing on July 9th, 1994 at 3am? Sleeping probably, most people would be, and if they weren’t it’s unlikely they’d remember what exactly they were doing at 3am on a random day any time in the past decade. But I can tell you.

The day after our first case together, Fox Mulder called me, after 2am, just to talk things over. At 3am I was still awake, thinking about all that we’d achieved, all that we still had to find out. And that was just the first time. Almost every night for the next seven years I was awake at three, talking to him, learning him, or awake by instinct, thinking of him and wondering if he would call. Whether I should call. I was never alone at 3am. He was just a phone call away.

And then he was closer. So close. He was under my skin and everywhere and when I woke up at 3am I could reach out and touch him. It turns out 2.47 was his nightmare blackspot, so 3am was when I would hold him and scare the demons away. Sometimes when I woke up he’d be watching me. Loving me. It was as simple as that. Every 3am, for better for worse he was there, loving me. Making love to me. Until he was gone.

The first 3am was the worst. I was in hospital and I didn’t know yet. I thought I was alone and that night was agony. The next one was a little better, for the imagined flutter of our baby growing inside me. So though 3am was hard, it wasn’t impossible. 3am was when I prayed for him. Prayed for them both. It was a painful peace but I had hope. Even after he died. 

Even after he came back different. 3am was a ritual, and it was close to the time he came to my door and asked if he was the father and then came back to me. He worshipped us both at 3am. All day really, but it was special at that moment. For as long as it lasted.

He left. 

I made him go. 

And part of me went with him. But the rest of me had a purpose. At 3am there would be soft snuffling on the baby monitor. I could while away the loneliness knowing that William needed me. That Mulder was gone but that I was still not alone.

Except now I am alone. 

That room where I used to rock him is empty, study furniture stacked hastily over the baby blue walls as if that can somehow make up for the silence. For the cold spot on my shoulder  where he used to lie. I bought new sheets. I thought maybe that would make it easier, but the bed is still empty doctor, the house is still empty. I am still empty. And 3am is the emptiest.

Every night. At that moment I lie awake an listen for the breathing of my son, for the heartbeat of my love, for the ringing of that phone from all those years ago, and when they don’t come, the silence smothers me.

That’s how difficult it is for me, doctor. And I’m sorry. But I can’t do this right now.’


	22. Mass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || On-The-Run || Angst || Easter Ficlet because I was having feelings

Mulder doesn’t stir when he feels her slip out of the motel bed, her footsteps Scully-soft to the the grimy little bathroom and the door eased shut. He’s not sure if she wants him to be awake, they haven’t said much since she turned hard off the freeway at 3am, and rolled to a stop in the parking lot. Something in her eyes told him not to ask, not to question why they were choosing to ignore their “no big cities rule” for Pittsburgh, of all places, and so he’d got the bags while she got the key, the grimy sun setting heavily behind her bleached out hair on the washed out walkway.

Afternoon sunshine stares through the blinds but he’s still lying still, trying to breathe sleepily when Scully emerges on a wave of her still familiar shower soap, and pauses at the foot of the bed. Mulder can feel her thinking, and holds his breath through her indecision, relief spreading from his lungs to his heart as Scully’s small hand wraps around his ankle.

‘Mulder?’ His morning breaks on her first word and he smiles at the thought though she is serious, stood in a worn but respectable floral dress she’d picked up last week in Goodwill, his only suit hanging from one finger. ‘Mulder, will you-’

‘Yes.’ He tells her. No questions, he would do anything for her. 

Scully watches him dress with a distant look in her eye, the still unfamiliar blonde of her hair a veil over one eye, and for a second he imagines marrying her, throwing aside fake names and false security for one moment of unity in the eyes of her God. But he was too selfish, choosing to have this runaway love in dark corners and forgotten towns, for as long as they can stay ahead of danger instead of that one true moment. He wonders if Scully shares that regret.

He looks for it in her eyes when she steps close to straighten his tie, but finds a peace there he had thought lost forever, just barely glossing over the tears he pretends not to hear her crying in the shower, but there nonetheless. She takes his hand and walks them into the late Friday sunshine.

The cab drops them two blocks from their destination, caution is always a factor, even though the weighty shadow of St Patrick’s Cathedral presses down on them and the throngs of other people tumbling into it’s gravity. Church on a Friday? Mulder thinks, and then it hits him. 

Good Friday. Light Easter suits all tumbling into a sacred place to remember a death. Scully seems to feel his comprehension and squeezes his hand, the incline of her head offering him an escape, but Mulder knows she wouldn’t have asked him to come if she hadn’t needed him here. 

He can’t remember the last time he was in a church, let alone one this full of people, and his momentary panic at being in a crowd is dulled by the echoing majesty of the space, the smallness of their predicament in this vaulted melting pot of people. Scully’s hand is sure in his, her movements purposeful as she finds space on a pew tucked behind a pillar, near to a fire exit, careful even in this small recklessness. The wood is hard against the back of his knees, the grey stone cold around him but the people, so many people, ebb and flow in muted colours and it has been so long since they were part of a crowd, so long since it has been more than just them against the world that Mulder doesn’t even notice the hush as the service starts, doesn’t notice anything until Scully letting go of his hand and sinking to her knees to clasp hers in prayer.

Mulder watches her lips form the Latin words of whatever the priest is saying, the woman he loves folded in the trappings of her faith, one of hundreds tasting those same words, feeling… whatever succour the faithful find in this moment. He’s briefly and intensely jealous; of God, of the church, of everybody who can understand this part of Scully that he has never been able to fathom. And then the music starts and his momentary pettiness dissolves into an entirely unexpected swirl of strings, accusatory horns and all chased down with the resonant growl of the organ. Beside him Scully sits back, a small smile of recognition on her lips but her head stays bowed, her hands held tightly enough that it’s as if she believes she is holding together the notes of every cadence.

Scully listens, lit from above by the evening light that filters weakly through the blue glass of the Virgin Mary’s robe, the shine on her cheek at the end of the Kyrie maybe a tear, or maybe an illusion, but either way she is beautiful. Mulder watches her listen, learns her from this devotional angle as the chorus soar around the arches of the cathedral and tumble back to the earth in crumbling chords. If only he could touch her without breaking the moment, Mulder thinks he could stay here for ever, suspended in this holy half-reality. These are Scully’s people, this is a safe space for her, and somehow the music has made him part of it, catching in his blood and imploring him to confess all those things he is trying not to feel; anger sparks on a diminished seventh and is soothed by the forgiveness of a perfect cadence. If they stay here long enough maybe the music could fix everything.

But the second the Agnus Dei ends, Scully is pulling him away, not even pausing for the blessing, her purpose fulfilled and her urgency ruffling the edge of the congregation until the heavy door swings closed behind them. Long paving slabs mark off the distance they are already putting between themselves and whatever just happened. 

Mulder still hasn’t asked why, hasn’t questioned any of it, knowing Scully will explain when, or if, she is ready, knowing that pushing her will only poison the air between Pittsburgh and wherever they run to next. He only hopes he doesn’t have to wait long. Scully rewards him as he folds his suit back into the holdall, bent over the basin in her slip, scrubbing at some invisible stain off the hem of the dress.

‘They were playing Saint-Saëns’ Requiem.’ 

Mulder hums, as if he knows what that means and waits for more, keeping his eyes on the dress held critically to the light instead of the half bare body behind it, whatever Scully is about to tell him, he wants to know more than he wants to feel her, though god does he want to feel-

‘Many consider Saint-Saëns to be a second rate composer. And he wasn’t a Catholic, so there’s a lot of questions as to whether he should even have written the Requiem. But he did, and he wrote it to be the approximate length that an actual mass would take, so it could be used instead of just performed. He wrote his own piece, but fit it to the Catholic church, he found a balance between respect and individuality. He wanted it to be used for worship… but people don’t use it very often.’

‘Because it’s no good? Or because he wasn’t a Catholic?’ Mulder asks, ‘Because I liked it a lot.’

And clearly for once he has said the right thing.

‘I love it.’ Scully says, with that defiant vigour he first fell in love with. ‘I’m not a very good Catholic, or a scholar of classical music but I find energy in his arrangement, it’s tormented and ecstatic all at once, there’s just some sort of conflict that makes me feel…’

‘Human?’ Mulder offers. 

And she smiles the smile with all the teeth, the one that folds her face differently, as though she doesn’t carry more tragedy than any woman should, but it dissolves too fast for him to capture.

‘Exactly. I saw the sign on the freeway and I had to stop. I had to go. I don’t miss the church… not really. Not most days. But it’s Easter, and I’d go with my mom… or it would have been… William… his first one you know… I didn’t know how to explain that. I just needed to go. I just needed to feel human.’

Mulder can’t remember the last time Scully mentioned William by name. He can’t remember the last time she admitted having human weaknesses. The lump in his throat thickens as he watches her breathe past the tears, scrunching the unfortunate dress in her hands before tossing it in the trashcan.

‘Thank you for taking me with you.’ 

He means it. 

‘You know we can go any time. If you wan’t to? If you need to confess or… I don’t know how it works Scully, but if you need to go, we can find ways.’

Scully crosses to him, and takes his hand, her posture once again that of prayer, though now they are in it together and her words are directed at the floor because they are too heavy to utter stood upright.

‘The problem is Mulder, _I_ don’t know how it works right now. I… I want to believe, to find that peace I remember but… it’s not working for me right now. And you can’t confess things you plan to do again for forgiveness.’

He lifts her chin, offering her his forgiveness because it is all he has. Offering her a way out if she wants it. 

‘Would you? Do it all again’ he asks, the soft words on his lips the closest thing to a prayer he’s uttered in the past year.

And Scully gives him one more miracle.

‘All of it. Every case. Every kiss.’ Her hand lays over his heart, absolving him of some of his guilt. ‘Everything except giving him up. If I’d known…’ and she runs out of bravery. Runs out of words but it’s enough for one evening.

They stay like that a long time, Scully’s forehead pressed to his chest, Mulder’s arms her only sanctuary and the silence of their sorrow their Easter Mass. 

They never return to Pittsburgh.


	23. Believer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || On the Run || PG || Believer

It’s midnight on the freeway and they’re driving fast going nowhere. If it weren’t for the rumble of the road, you wouldn’t know they were moving, his hands steadfast on the wheel and the stars overhead rolling with them, pinprick minutes counting down to the morning. 

She bought a booklight in a charity shop to stay up with him, though it makes more sense to drive shifts, togetherness is one of the only things they have left and they treasure it. He shifts gears just to do something and she rolls her shoulders, vertebra making check-marks on his arm; she is close, she is safe, she is his.

Mulder smiles.

She once asked him about getting out of the car, only to climb in a few years later and tell him she was ready to run. So they will run until the road runs out, until the stars stand still. He will run until the light that is Scully burns out beside him. He is safe in the cocoon of her lamplight, he is happy in the shadow of her sun. 

She feels him thinking and closes the book, turning to press her lips against his shoulder, tasting his closeness. She flicks off the light, welcoming the dark, and him with it. 

How foolish they were to try and separate the two, to stay apart so long. One without the other is half of a whole, day without night, a drawing with no shade. He brings her perspective, she brings him depth.

Love, Mulder thinks as the sky begins to lighten in the rearview, is where two such extremes meet and something unexpected happens. If you didn’t know, you’d never expect the night sky’s transition to sun to manifest as an eruption so gold and splendid as this desert sunrise. Looking at him and Scully, an outsider could never comprehend the roar in his chest when she smiles at him or the vagabond happiness they have found in this beat-up car. 

He wouldn’t have predicted it. 

Scully flicks the radio on, skips stations and snorts indulgently when Mulder lunges across to take over and crank it loud, one arm slung around her as he sings along.

He’s not sure in what precisely any more, but like The Monkees, Fox Mulder is a believer. 


	24. Orion's Belt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written as a pick me up for @sunflowerseedsandscience || Post IWTB || PG

It was dark when she entered the hospital; that inky hopeless four in the morning kind of black, and the air had stung her lungs. Scully had breathed it anyway, welcoming the sharpness of the cold, and pausing for a second to look up at the sky and feel the smallness of her anxiety against the backdrop of the universe,

The three kings ride high in the West, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintak sitting brightly in Orion’s belt, their names ready in her mind even as it races to the surgery ahead. This was the first constellation she’d learned to spot, Ahab’s hand steady on her shoulder, and the way those names sounded in her mouth always made him feel closer. She needs him today, his steadfast belief in her as enduring as those stars, She needs everything to get through it; this last hope, last attempt surgery, the one that will decide whether another mother gets to take her son home or joins Scully in the type of grief that never truly fades.

The cold pinches the fear tighter in her chest and she moves into the glow of artificial light and away from the stars. She has made her wish, said her prayer and now it all comes down to skill.

* * *

It is dark when she leaves the hospital; that infinite velvet of a just-swallowed sun, all lit from behind with pinprick complexities that seem random but trace neatly back to some great cosmic beginning.

Scully can’t see much in the new moon’s light as her eyes adjust out of the neon glare, but his shadow, draped over her car, is as familiar as her own heartbeat.

Mulder doesn’t speak when she reaches him, opening his arms to fold her in when she steps as close as she can get without losing herself in him. He’s warm in the darkness, and solid and he smells a little of wood smoke and turpentine and she wonders why, but the silence is too silvered to ask. Instead she curls in closer to the fire of his body and lets his fingers roam through her hair, counting the strokes like her mother taught her as a child.

They’re still in the darkness, but it doesn’t seem so dense as it once did and the dangers are shared with other people and not caught between just them. Scully hums low, one flat note of almost-contentment and she tells him,

‘He might live,’ and feels Mulder’s smile against her.

Might is a lot more than she’d expected, might is close to maybe and not too far from probably and God, probably is all anyone ever really has when it comes to mortality.

Mulder feels the change in her body and lets go, swings round to the drivers side to take them home but she tugs on his hand to stop him, pointing up at her stars, spun around now to start in the East like a new morning.

‘The boys are headed West again,’ Mulder acknowledges, and presses winter-rough lips to the back of her hand. And this time Scully smiles, at the circularity of it all, at the changing of the seasons and the passing of the years and the endless, momentous spin of the earth, bringing about new opportunities and stretching lives into something more than we ever expect to live. 

‘Things always come back around,’ she says.


	25. Back Seats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scully/Tad & MSR || Revival - MS 1 || Teen || Angst

Scully can’t remember the last time she was in a limo but she suspects it may have been the premiere of that dreadful movie. Even then, it hadn’t felt like this. Any car that she and Mulder shared somehow felt like a crappy rental, like they carried the atmosphere with them of all those shared hours, the stale air and shared confidences turning the expensive leather into well worn velour and any sense of grandeur into their easy intimacy.

The cool press of a crystal flute to her fingers drags her out of her memory and she looks apologetically across at Tad.

‘Sorry. I was miles away. It’s been a long day.’ And she is sorry, because she hadn’t meant to spend her time with him thinking about Mulder. Quite the opposite in fact. It had been calculated recklessness that had made her accept his invitation.

Tad shares Mulder’s intensity but not his demons, he is younger, unbent by defeat and he looks at her like she is a woman, not like she’s the oxygen he needs just to breathe. Going back to the X-Files and allowing herself back into Mulder’s orbit is a risk she thought she was ready to take. She’d carved out a Scully-shaped space in her life, filled it to the edges with all the things she was, all the things she wanted and could still have, and she’d believed that what she’d found was strong enough to stand up to Mulder’s gravity.

And then he’d looked at her. And ice was water and stone was dust and she was twenty-six and walking across the basement office, ready to prove herself to him, ready to go to war with him, ready to love him.

She doesn’t want to be like that anymore.

So she chose Tad. 

Tad, with his shiny limo and clean lines and blacked out windows. She could drink champagne with a Tad, she could watch him watch her lick the chill of champagne off her lip and not surrender. She could let him lean across and kiss her, let him try to learn the secrets of her lips with his youthful enthusiasm, but not fear that he would taste everything there that she had lost. Everything she was hiding. 

She could invite him inside, let him lead her up the stairs, let him undo her blouse and watch his face with calm detachment as he took in the soft scars and still smooth planes of her body. She could appreciate his physique without knowing his soul, she could, she could…

She couldn’t. 

When he tries to find his way past those last barriers, to slide his fingers inside, she stiffens and pulls away. Her experiment fails. Academically she can desire Tad, she can want what he would mean, but his hands are not at home on her skin. She could invite him to the door of her life, her body, her heart, but she cannot let him in because the only space she has to offer is already taken.

It’s just like the car; Mulder has stained the very fabric of her being and even in his absence, he is in her bed, his fingers making mockery of her clothes. She cannot be loved, desired even, without the strength of his love and desire laying itself over whoever else she has picked and diminishing them to nothing.

And so she closes her shirt, closes her legs, and pushes Tad away. Politely, calmly, the scientist in her explaining that the champagne has gone to her head, too much, too fast, when what she means is, “not enough, you could never be enough.”

The problem, Scully thinks as she closes her door behind him and rests her head on the cool wood, is that she’s not sure if _she_ is enough without Mulder, and she fears that being with him again may be more than she can bear. 


	26. T-Shirt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || Missing scene Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster || Teen

She hadn’t thought twice about packing it. The soft fabric of Mulder’s t-shirt had folded in between her tailored pants and crisp shirts as though it belonged there; his and hers blending into theirs as though she’d never walked away.

Perhaps she has broken her Mulder-dependency but she had yet to wean herself off the side-effects. She still circles ridiculous, X-File worthy stories in the paper for him before remembering his paper is being delivered 20 miles away. She still keeps beers in the fridge though she always picks wine when she’s home alone. She hasn’t taken his classic rock CDs out of her car and when she makes long journeys she sometimes puts them on and hears him singing along, slightly flat, in her memory. And she still sleeps in his shirt.

Putting it on tonight after a day that reminds her of the best of the old days has been bittersweet, she’d almost made herself believe that he would come knocking and they’d suddenly both know what to say to make everything okay. That in the dim light of the ugly lamp he would peel the t-shirt off her the way he hadn’t on that very first night she’d come running to him in the dark. Maybe from there they could rewrite their history and give it a happy ending.

The knock came but the resolution didn’t and instead she watches the man she will always love catch fire with a theory, guessing her arguments before she can make them. She wonders if he even notices what she is wearing. Maybe she is the one who left but he had been the one to check out of everything good in their life together. Perhaps his hunger for life has returned but his hunger for her doesn’t seem to have survived the separation. All it would take is for him to ask, with words or eyes, and she would never leave him again. Willing him to notice she even flirts a little, a taste of the old antagonistic humour that always drew him to her but he seems oblivious. 

He rushes out as fast as he rushed in and as the door swings shut she buries her face in the shirt stretched tight across her knees. Mulder’s smell has long since washed out of the worn fabric but the firm press of her legs through the fabric against her face carries her for small eternities back into the safety of his chest. It’s a technique she perfected in the months she believed him to be dead and it comforts her still. Wrapping herself tightly in her own arms she breathes deeply imagining him there, something between a memory and a prayer and for a second she believes she can feel him solid and alive against her in the orange light and for that second she is whole again.

* * *

He stands silently outside her door, fists tight as he tries to find the courage to turn around and return to her. Seconds pass, then minutes and all is quiet behind him. Turning, he presses both palms flat to the wood of her door, dipping his forehead to rest against the thing that keeps her from seeing how lost he is without her. Scully. He half expects her to sense him here as he sends his desperate wishes through the six feet of emptiness to gather at his feet.

Not long ago he thought he’d lost her forever.

But tonight she was wearing his t-shirt.

Maybe, just maybe, he can find his way home


	27. The Road Not Taken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || G Rated
> 
> Post Home Again, Scully runs into Ethan Minette, 23 years after she walked out of his life and looks at her life a little differently. This was written in response to a tumblr prompt and is not beta-d, forgive me any clumsiness and typos!

Scully was dining alone when she saw him, a habit she’d picked up in those first, agonising months after she walked away from her old life, walked away from Mulder. The evenings had been the hardest, the echo of her empty apartment lengthening the shadow of her grief into something smothering, something that filled every sense with a heaviness that she couldn’t escape. So she had fled, to restaurants and cafes where she could lose herself in a book or her laptop, disappear into the hum of of families, friends and lovers completing the patterns of their lives and only creeping back into the silence of her home in time to curl up and cry herself to sleep. The tears had stopped eventually but the dinner habit had stuck.

There had been less of them since the X-Files crept back into her life, since Mulder had begun slowly, surely to reclaim the corners of her world she’d never truly cleared him out of. Scully still pretends that she is surprised when he calls at 10pm to talk about nothing, when he shows up at her door with a case-file and a cardboard coffee cup, but she knows her indignant eyebrow is convincing neither of them. It’s like the old days, unspoken questions and maybe tomorrows written into long glances and indulgent smiles. Mulder is once again a man with purpose and she feels like maybe this time she’s a part of that purpose instead of just the one who will help him find it. It felt that way in the seedy motel with the peeping Jackalope. It felt that way outside the hospital where she watched him try to protect her, when he tried for the first time in forever to verbalise what she meant to him. Scully wishes they had had more time to work it out before Mulder became the last, best thing she had to cling to at her mother’s bedside.

  
Maybe Mulder is ready to be her partner again but she needs more than that to anchor her in her grief. She needs family. And the last time she asked Mulder to be that they both drowned in the undertow of their lost son.

Which is why she’s here, sipping coffee in a corner booth of a local bistro, pretending to read a report on her laptop but really staring blankly at the people passing through in the evening light. She finds her gaze returning over and again to the same man, to the strangely familiar curl of hair at the base of his skill, but she doesn’t recognise him until he turns slightly and the familiar profile explains away her confusion.

  
Ethan Minette has aged the same way he did everything else; neatly, regularly and by the book. There are laughter lines stretching back towards a slightly recessed hairline and strands of silver in with the short dark curls,styled almost identically to the way they were when she closed her apartment door on him and the last of his things. His laugh is the same too. Short and easy and directed at the two teenagers sat across the table from him. Scully spots his eyes in the daughter, grudgingly giggling through too much eyeliner and a heavy fringe and his son, inexplicably redheaded and at that awkward gangling stage before the muscles catch up with the growth. It’s not a perfect picture but it is a happy one.

A fourth space is set at the table and for a half-second Scully believes it is for her, that the universe has folded and she is the missing part of this puzzle. She can imagine herself walking in, shaking the cold off her coat and meeting Ethan’s gaze across the room. He’d look at her like he always had, like she was some sort of mythical creature, emerging from the light and she would feel like she used to, safe and special, and maybe a little annoyed because undoubtedly he would have ordered for her in a misguided gesture of gentile adoration.

She’d throw her belongings on the back of the chair and hesitate just a second before crossing to give both kids a one-armed hug at once, they’d groan or roll their eyes, playing at being too old for public displays of affection but curl into her nonetheless, heads resting together like they had at story-time when they were small. She’d pretend not to be breathing them in, not to see their dad watching them across the table with a softness in his eyes that still staggers her before straightening up and demanding an update on homework and life and all the things that she misses when she works long hours at the hospital, mentally making to-do lists and shopping lists for the weekend. During dinner she’d try and coax a secret from her daughter, to rekindle that childhood closeness they’d shared, she’d throw a sideways smile at Ethan when he slid his hand onto her knee, a promise for later and just stare at her shy son, marvelling at his height and the warmth of his sudden smile…

Scully is so lost in her imaginings that she’s almost surprised when the door opens and somebody else walks into her fantasy. A tall, slim blonde with trendy glasses and a drapey top drops into the empty seat with a sigh and draws them all together. She can hear the chime of the woman’s voice through the ambient noise, sees Ethan lean into her like she’s the centre of his world and watches their kids light up, the boy with the glow of his mother’s attention and the girl with an irritation that soon turns into a heated cross-table debate. As quickly as it had formed, the rosy dream Scully had built dissolves to nothing and she finds herself staring at an empty coffee cup on a half-empty table for two.

Regret flashes through her, chased by that endless series of what-ifs that she tries never to dwell on. What if she had chosen Ethan over the X-Files? What if she had never been abducted? What if she had never given William up…

The buzz of her phone cuts through the gathering ache of everything that has been lost.

Mulder.

A picture of her front door. Then of his shoes, out of focus, then a bag of Chinese food, his finger and half of his face, confused and squinting down at the camera. Scully smiles. Technology and Mulder have never been natural bedfellows, evidenced by the confusion in his voice when he calls, seconds later.

‘I was trying to call you Scully but the camera kept flashing. I don’t understand this phone at all!’ His voice has mellowed over the years but there are traces of those early, endlessly perplexing cases in his complaint.

‘I did offer to show you how to work it properly!’ is her only reproach. She had. And he’d turned her down, determined as always to do it his own way, however ridiculous it was.

  
‘I’m at your apartment Scully. I thought maybe you might want food… and maybe company…’. Mulder pauses, still unsure how welcome he is in her life. ‘…But you’re not here so I guess you probably don’t need-’

  
She cuts him off.

‘I’ll be back in five Mulder. You can let yourself in. Make yourself at home’. And as Scully gathers her belongings to leave, she realises that she means it, wholeheartedly. Somehow, without her realising, Mulder has become her safe place again. She’d come to her old escape, looking for answers and found more than she was expecting; a glimpse of a life that could never have been enough. Maybe Ethan has a full table, maybe she could have shared it with him but home is waiting for her at the other end of the phone. It’s not a house in the suburbs or two mostly-grown children. It’s not what her parents planned for her but it is hers.

  
Hers and Mulder’s. Theirs is a world of light and shade, terrifying shadow and blissful happiness and every grey inbetween. Alone it was too much to bear, when he got lost she hadn't been able to hold on, but together it is the fullest, strangest sort of wonderful. It is every emotion magnified, loss and frustration but love too, and adventure and friendship and hope. It is the life she was meant to have and if Mulder is willing she is ready to start living it again.

Scully crosses the restaurant at speed, rushing towards her decision with a certainty she hasn’t felt in months, years maybe. She hears a questioning ‘Dana?’ from the Minette table as she passes but she doesn’t slow. Now is not the time for dwelling on the past. She’s going after her future, following the road taken all those years ago and putting everything else behind her.


	28. The Cover-Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || Pre- Home Again ||PG || Humour

‘Mr Mulder, I need you to stay still while I perform the adjustment. It’s very hard to properly align your spine when you keep trying to sit up to talk your wife.’

Mulder grimaces at the chiropractor.

‘She’s not my wife, she’s my… Scully.’ They haven’t quite worked out what to call this unofficial cohabitation yet. There’s sex and dinner, her things back in her closet and no talk about the future beyond what takeout to bring home the next evening.

‘Well will your Scully still be here in five minutes time?’ The chiropractor doesn’t seem to know the no talking about the future rule, so Mulder is forced to sit up again and crane round the man to catch Scully’s amused eyebrow and slight nod. That’s five minutes he can be certain of and he lies back down obediently.

Five minutes, three loud cracks and a lot of groaning later, Mulder walks out of the doctor’s office, Scully at his side, and significantly more upright than he had staggered in.

He makes it to the car without wincing, but the door wont budge and when he turns back to complain he finds Scully wearing one of his most feared looks, the “I know you’re holding something back and I’m going to make you talk” special.

‘Mulder,’ she begins, deviousness flickering at the corner of her mouth, ‘Are you going to tell me how you really put your back out now?

He tries to lie. Tries the door handle. 

‘I told you, I fell off a chair checking the smoke detector’.

Neither releases him from her stare.

‘The smoke detector is the other side of the room from where I found you. And that story doesn’t explain this.’ Scully’s holding up her phone now, her expression almost diabolical in its suppressed amusement. Two taps and it begins. The song that was his downfall. Literally.

‘Scully - don’t - ‘

But she’s merciless.

‘Admit it Mulder. You had my dock on and….’

He can’t admit it. Won’t. But the music blaring from her phone is drawing attention and his back hurts and he wants to get in the car.

‘IwasdancingtothesingleladysongandItriedtodothecrawlingthingandIhurtmyback.’

Mulder figures if he says it very fast and very quietly at least it will be over. But Scully only grins more.

‘I knew you were a closet Beyoncé fan. Do the hand thing.’

‘Scully no!’

‘Do the hand thing and I’ll let you in the the car and when we get home I’ll show you how I ride my surfbort.’

Mulder does the hand thing.


	29. Thursday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revival || Angst || Teen
> 
> A prompt - what are (canon compliant) Mulder and Scully up to Thanksgiving 2016?

On Thursdays you don’t have to be thankful. You don’t have to be anything at all. You can be mostly upright with a tight smile and it’s good enough for the world. Thursdays are an almost day. They’re not a relief of a burden. They just are.

Scully likes Thursdays fine.

This Thursday she has the day off. It’s a soft sweater Thursday, a hot tea and a good book Thursday. The kind of day where it’s okay to be by yourself, draw a bath and not think too much about the world.

It is not a turkey day. The family pictures are turned down, for dusting… Not for absence. This is not a Thursday to consider the surplus of dining chairs around the table, or wonder if the grass at the base of that not-yet-weathered white headstone needs trimming. The TV is off, the chain is on and it’s just a Thursday. You can cry on a Thursday and it doesn’t much matter.

You can cry because you’re angry. Because you’re lonely. Sad. 

So very, very sad.

It’s just a Thursday.

Thursday is a fine day for your brothers to be a world away. The long dead stay dead and you don’t have to remember small onesies with cranberry print and knitted hats for a short walk and a long drive. You don’t have be grateful on a Thursday.

You don’t even have to get dressed. Or act out your good intentions. If your comforter is heavy with the world you can stay underneath and wish it away. Thursdays belong to no religion and no tradition. They just are. They exist.

And this Thursday all you can do is exist.

Inhale.

Exhale.

…

It’s almost Friday when the door goes. Three knocks before midnight.

Tin foil and turkey sandwiches from the all-night, all-day, all-year deli. It’s not much but it’s something. 

Someone.

Still the one. And maybe Thursday can be your day. The day you let him see you crumble. The day you let him hold you while you cry.

Why does it take falling apart to bring you together? 

Why is he what you find when all else is lost?

In the emptiness of a rented flat, on a joyless holiday you give up giving him up. Maybe what you have is not much. Maybe it’s not enough for the long haul. But it’s enough for a Thursday. 

You are thankful for that.


	30. Actually

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR meets Love, Actually | Angsty  Christmas Fluff | No Beta | Speed Write | PG 13  

 

They had first seen it on a rare night of normalcy, saccharine sweetness stolen from the endless adrenaline of running. The whole evening had been stolen in fact, the faulty fire door lock on an Iowa cinema letting them sink softly into a darkness full of cuddling couples and popcorn smells and no conspiracy at all.

Mulder had scoffed at first, but silenced when she slid her hand, small in his, to rest on his knee and put her head on his shoulder. In a way it was their first date. They’d always got things backwards; they’d done the sex and the baby first and were the living epitome of “til death do us part” even if they’d never got the piece of paper, but they’d never sat in a cinema to actually watch the movie.

That night, at the credits, Mulder nuzzled her ear and said the porn stand-in couple reminded him of them. That they had had some of their best and most complex discussions somewhere between losing their clothes and coming undone on hired bedsheets. Scully had countered that they were more like Bill Nighy and his manager, indelibly bound, with her always cleaning up his mess. Maybe they were both. They had passed that new year tangled naked together, half a bottle of scotch down, in love, actually, even if the world was against them.

It had turned into a sort of ritual after that, a DVD bought at a gas station stuffed in her fuzzy slipper sock when she woke up next Christmas morning, a rerun caught on the TV in her mom’s kitchen, a punch to the stomach every time she cycled past it when channel hopping on her first Christmas alone in a too quiet apartment.

She could see them in every narrative now.  Their love story a spectrum of bliss and pain that was still waiting for that ribbon tied happy ending.

Their early years were Mark and Aurelia. They had understood each other instinctively despite having nothing in common; their clashing dialects of wild theorisation and science never quite managing to stop them reaching an agreement but neither quite brave enough to lean in. Until they did. Then they were as glowingly happy as the couple walking out of a church to the The Beatles, though the dark cloud at their door was not an ex-lover but the long shadow of an old enemy. 

Mulder hadn’t understood her making him leave any more than Karl had understood Sarah. He hadn’t understood that she didn’t know how to protect both him and the bundle of joy that slumbered between them the night she begged him to save himself. Whoever said that if you love someone, you let them go, never wrote down the next past about the endless second guessing of your decision. The agony of self-imposed aloneness, deep cuts untouched by family gathering in support, kept open as circling danger proves to you over and again that you made the right decision, cannot be done justice in words. Scully’s face had crumpled in sorrow just like Liam Neeson’s more times than she could count, her son’s little fists drumming on her chest as she shook with regret. She had felt like a widow then.

To paint them as Colin Frizzle was a little tenuous perhaps. But after all the pain of losing William, of losing everything, there were nights in the dingy bars of nowhere towns where all that kept them upright under their grief was cheap beer and the promise of sex when they staggered back to whatever room was home that week. It was easier to be oblivious than to feel the pain. 

They stopped that when Scully was offered a way back home, a carte blanche to a real life that Mulder had insisted she take. There was no place for recklessness in the endless questioning she had faced about his whereabouts, no room for error in painstakingly careful cash purchase of a small house in the middle of nowhere and no bars within walking distance of where they were finally reunited. She’d flung herself on Mulder at the airport in a most uncharacteristic display of need when they finally found a way to bring him home; hot hard kisses knocking off his baseball cap as his mouth told her he missed her so badly it didn’t matter if the cameras caught them for a moment. 

Scully thinks of that moment often. The ecstatic rush of chemicals that told her she was safe, that she was loved and whole and that this was the happy ending they’d been holding out for.

But it hadn’t been.

Of course she was destined for the tragic ending. For the Joni Mitchell soundtracked weeping in an empty bedroom, standing next to a throw that reminded her of him. There hadn’t been another woman. The Mia to her Karen had been their unfinished work; that old elusive truth and his weakness, sliding between them during night shifts and small meaningless fights. Scully had tried not to see it, to invest in the happiness, to keep loving all the good in Mulder even as he fed into the bad. And then suddenly they were on opposite sides of an immovable force. The life she was living had become ridiculous, a facade of domesticity behind which two broken people were struggling to go on.

Karen had stayed. She had children to think of. She had hope and a sense of duty and a repentant idiot of a husband to work with. Scully’s child was already gone, they were all out of hope and Mulder was in too deep to even understand what she meant when she tried once to talk to him. She was already alone. And so she had left.

She had left the battered old DVD on the shelf next to Caddyshack and Nosferatu and run. Not far, but far enough for him to notice, to give chase if he wanted to make things right. He’d never shown up at her door with cards and carols, or run through an airport or held up a boombox or blasted opera out of a limo outside her building. Maybe they were too old for grand gestures. Maybe he just actually believed it was over.

Two Christmases passed where she hadn’t watched the movie and where she’d leave a shop if Otis Redding’s version of White Christmas started playing. The world had heaped more grief on her in that time, her mother now one more grave to take flowers to on Christmas Eve, but on a whim one night in Decemver Scully decides it is time to start claiming back the things she loves. With the opening credits paused on her Netflix, she pulls on the Knicks shirt she stole and makes a bowl of popcorn. She’s almost done when the door goes. She’s not expecting anyone but knows exactly who it will be.They have been finding their way back in small steps and sideways looks.

His coat has a dusting of snow on the shoulders and his nose is a little red from the cold. He has wine in one hand and the other reaches into his pocket to pull out a DVD. 

Scully crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

‘Love Actually, Mulder?’

And he smiles, the real kind that folds his face into its happiest form and bends to peck her on the cheek. His lips are a memory she has tried to lock away, but one touch and she’s remembering all the ways they have made her forget to be sad; words, weirdness and devouring kisses and he’s in her apartment before she realises she’s issued the invitation. 

‘Wanna watch a movie Scully?’ Mulder asks, flopping on to her couch as if he’s perfectly at home and leaving one arm along the back of the seat. She taps the remote by way of an answer and sits down, relaxing back into the warm spot under his arm and thinks that maybe this is home after all. 

Maybe their story isn’t a tragedy, maybe it’s just not over yet. There’s love here, real love, and maybe now, here together, they can actually find a way to make it work.


	31. Inconstancy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 100 Prompts - "You Should Have Known Better"

You thought that nothing in your life would ever become more important to you than finding your sister, that five feet and two inches of scientific process with wide eyes and a bad suit was just another speed bump. You thought you’d scare her away with wild eyes and wilder theories and monsters that were really men. You thought she was a spy. 

**You should have known better.**

* * *

You thought that maybe with her at your side things could be different; that with two players the rules might change. You shouted louder and you ran faster and you never, ever gave up. You thought she was your secret weapon, your saviour and your superpower. You thought she was untouchable but lights on a mountain took her and proved you wrong the way she always wanted to. 

**You should have known better.**

* * *

You swore when she came back that you’d never let it happen again. That external forces would never drive you apart. But you forgot about the internal, about the insidious creep of cells turning on cells and withering from within what time and age have yet to touch. You told her you would save her though you didn’t believe it. She saw the promise in your eyes that if she went you would follow, what would be left for you without her? She told you to hold on. The three bullets in your pistol were the first time you planned to betray her trust. One for each of the gunmen and the last one for you. You thought you could disappoint her once for eternity together. 

 **You should have known better**.

* * *

You thought it would never happen. That the beautiful and the broken could never come together and then she was standing over you in just her wedding white skin. She showed you how she was broken too and then held you together. It was more than making love. You were making life. Bringing meaning to the dark space that clung to you like the child you would never have. Over and again she told you with her body and her lips and her heart that this was it. That this was everything. That it was happening. That you were and would always be enough. 

**You should have known better.**

* * *

* * *

You felt it when she ran with you. The empty space between you where he should have been. The empty cot folded in the closet of every grey motel you lay with her in. You tried. You both tried. You poured your love for each other into that hole and prayed that somehow he would feel it and forgive you so you could forgive yourselves. But as he would have grown, so did the emptiness and where once it was newborn, small and heavy on her breast, it was soon toddling away and riding bikes in the chasm of silence that stretched between you. One night you tried to breach it. You pulled out all the pictures and made her look. You made her cry and then you begged her not to leave you. Not to lose you. She promised she wouldn’t. 

**You should have known better.**

* * *

* * *

You’ve taken to writing in your empty home. Mostly in notebooks, in files and on receipts but sometimes on the walls when the words come to you in unexpected places. It’s funny really. She was always the one who made notes, but left alone you find yourself writing down all the things you want to tell her if you ever get the chance. When that opportunity finally knocks, quiet and tentative, you race around the house to find the highlights. You arrange them into sentences that will tell her how much more clearly you understand things now, how much you need her, how much better you can do. You think somehow that all this planning will make it easier to stand before her and make her believe as she once did. 

**You should have known better.**

* * *

Words are just words but you and Scully are something else. Energy maybe. When she catches you in her gaze you expect to find the tempest you’ve felt ever since you woke up this morning. There is only stillness. Clear, blue certainty. Somehow she already understands what you need to tell her and though there’s caution in the slant of her shoulders, there’s potential in the softness of her face. Maybe this time you wont need seven years to convince her, Scully always was good at understanding the evidence straight away. And she sees right through your jokes to the acceptance and the forgiveness you couldn’t give her before, to the love you hid away along with the part of you that is, and always has been, hers. She accepts your offering and her eyes say that she loves you but still needs time. Yours tell her you’ll wait forever. And she already knows that too. 

Everything that needed to be said is said without words, short seconds on a busy sidewalk. 

You should have known.


	32. Alaska

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the Run

The moon barely makes it over the horizon, resting bloated and orange just on the top of the hills. It looks as tired as she feels. 

The nights are short here, midsummer stuffed in a too small cabin where she and the man she loves count days, runaway hours between nothing and nowhere. She thinks she still loves him. She says she does when he asks, when he reaches for her desperate for what is lost and can be found for a few moments between her legs, on the tip of her tongue, in the muscle memories of the time before they knew that them together was the kind of fire that burned away everything that was good.

He’d found this place, slipped them up to the nowhere lands of the 49th state and hidden them from the world. He’d carved that quiet life she’d joked about out of nothing. And it’s too quiet. There are no planes overhead to carve the silence up into manageable chunks, no cars to carry her mind away, just him and her and two rooms and nowhere to hide.

The nights are shrunken now to the very smallest shadow and soon she will lose darkness as well as noise. She’s not sure how she will bear the scrutiny of white nights, thin fingers of light creeping through cracks to spotlight the pillow tears she hides. He is not strong enough to see her weakness. She is not brave enough to break.

Already she waits until he leaves on his once monthly supply run, and when the truck passes out of hearing she screams and cries until she is empty and numb. Then she waits for him to return, crushing that part of her that whispers maybe he wont and that maybe alone would be better. She should pray but she can’t find God in the quiet. 

She can’t even find herself.


	33. O

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S7 || Smuttish

It turns out surrender is a vowel.

‘Oh’, is an inhale with no punctuation when his little finger brushes hers on the couch and he doesn’t pull it away. The ’ah’ at the end of his name has never been snatched the way it is when she gasps ‘Mulder’, one inch south of his ear and six north of where his lips are chasing her necklace across her collarbone.

They’ve never spoken in in full sentences, but now they don’t speak at all, joining up looks that dance dangerously between “are you sure”, and “so help me if you stop touching me I will kill you and -YES!”. 

This is what he wants. This is what she wants, and all it took to break down seven years of excuses was one, single, vowel, rolling roundly from her lips - the same lips pulling at air the way her body is now pulling him home, over and over again - one vowel to loop around all the promises they’ve ever made and tie them together on her bedsheets.

Surrender is an “O”.

Dotted on the skin of his shoulder, fading into the sheets with their sweat as they both give up the fight and win.


	34. Token

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MSR || S6 - Post HTGSC 
> 
> So after being unable to write a damn thing for weeks, I came up with some ridiculous headcanons about how Mulder might try and flirt in ways that are as weird as everything else he does. This drabble is the first result. Forgive my rust

“It’s a spoon, Mulder.” 

She’d wondered, as she shuffled in from an endless Christmas Eve in a haunted house, if just maybe she had filled her weirdness quota for the year. She’d run a bath. loaded it with lavender oil and flicked the button on her pants open with a sigh that ran into a yawn, just in time for him to knock. She should be furious, she shouldn’t have got him the Infamous Hauntings of the Chesapeake Bay VCR, and she definitely shouldn’t have let him in… but in the early hours light, all Scully can manage is to be glad to see him.

And confused.

For a horrible moment Scully thinks the heavy rattle of the poorly wrapped tube might open to reveal something ordered from one of Mulder’s hotlines, and that she might finally be forced to choose whether she wants to fuck, marry or kill her partner. It would be just like Mulder to bring a Dickensian reckoning to her door on a holiday, but the poorly wrapped parcel yields something that very definitely is not a vibrator. It’s a-

‘A  _Welsh_  spoon Scully.’ His voice is thick with intent and his eyebrows are mimicking her meaningful waggle with limited success because she truly has no idea what this means.

The spoon is large, wooden and the distant cousin of a salad server; the handle carved not inexpertly with a chain, a wheel and a heart. Scully flips it in her hands. hoping for some sort of clue to leap out and explain but when nothing arrives and Mulder’s expectant face hasn’t slipped she’s forced to ask.

‘I didn’t think you’d ever been to Wales Mulder?’ And apparently that’s not the right question because as he leans over and tries to shove the spoon back into its’ paper, she catches a flicker of disappointment that he hides behind a search for the remote and a flatter than usual tone.

‘I haven’t. I found it in my mum’s things and it was kinda cool so I looked up the myth and… you know what Scully? It’s just a stupid spoon, don’t worry, I’ll do better next year. Do you want to watch something festive or shall we see in there are any X-Files on my new tape? Oh and is there more beer? I have some in my car I could grab? You weren’t going to bed were you Scully? I should have asked earlier.’

They’re good at this, at asking all the wrong questions to avoid getting the correct answer, and by the time Scully’s saved her kitchen from Mulder’s popcorn urge, found the remote and sat down with fresh beers, all trace of the spoon and its’ packaging are gone. She files “Welsh Spoon” on the ever growing of questions she will ask if she ever has the time or the courage, before shifting her attention to Mulder’s fascination with the “Cape Charles Creeper”. The last thing Scully remembers before falling asleep is a half-hearted attempt to kick Mulder for his continued insistence that there are circumstances where paranormal apparitions might leave tangible footprints. She wonders if her foot has left a print on the soft skin of Mulder’s thigh, if she’s marked her path as firmly across his being as he’s forged his tracks to every part of her soul. 

Scully wakes to grey sky and an empty apartment, and attributes the slight echo of loneliness she feels to the diffused flatness of the light and the less-than-average number of decorations she’s found time to put up. The bottles from the night before are stacked neatly on the counter and the wrapping paper is folded for recycling. This is the kind of note Mulder leaves, actions replacing words, and she finds the Welsh spoon shoved in her odd utensil drawer like the afterthought it clearly wasn’t.

She forgets it’s there when she leaves the house, it doesn’t cross her mind at all until the night has drawn back in and the salad utensils get passed over for her to dry, the fat wooden tines of the fork niggling at her as she tries to work out what she’s missing.

‘Penny for them?’ Maggie’s shoulders are tired but her eyes are bright and sometimes it’s easier to ask your mom the ridiculous questions. Scully feigns a disinterested tone.

‘I was just wondering if you’d ever heard of a Welsh spoon?’ It sounds even more ridiculous than she’d thought it would, but Maggie only grins and crosses to her store cupboard, stacking the good china and drying her hands on the dishrag. 

‘Do you mean Welsh love spoons?’ Scully nods. ‘Sure I have! I think your father even brought me one back from a tour he did in Europe. It’s an old folk tradition, leftover from when men had to prove they were capable carpenters to a girl’s father. But these days it’s mostly a sweet sentimental thing, the carvings all mean different things, mine had three balls, one for each of you kids, it was before Charlie… and a heart for love and a… something for fidelity maybe? I forget. Why do you ask?’

Scully can’t even begin to formulate an honest response for that one so she lies. Gently. 

‘I heard it mentioned in a documentary I was watching.’ Maggie looks unconvinced but lets it go to help manoeuvre the turkey pan out of the sink.

It takes Scully almost the entire week to find a book on Welsh traditions, hampered slightly by her need to pretend that the unknown significance of the spoon, now set by her bed and studied with clinical intensity, isn’t driving her to distraction.

It’s New Years Eve when she finally finds the time to thumb through the pages, to locate the key to deciphering Mulder’s gift, and she’s barely done when the door rattles with his knock and the spoon and the book get shoved unceremoniously under the couch.

‘Chesapeake Chiller Volume 2!’ He announces as he barrels in and makes himself at home.

‘Because of course we can’t just get drunk and watch Dick Clark like normal humans?’ Scully admonishes, kicking at the shoe he’s just shucked in her direction.

‘Do you want to be normal Scully?’ Mulder says, his voice softened by the back of the couch and maybe something close to vulnerability. And knowing what she now knows she can’t make him suffer, instead conceding a smile, winning one in return and then heading for the popcorn. A normal man would never have given her a spoon for Christmas that said more than any expensive jewellery ever could.

A horseshoe for luck, a cross for faith, a wheel for support, all bound together by chains that finish in a lock that means security. Scully feels all those things. But the one she feels the most in that moment is the heart, sitting slightly wonkily atop their unconventional totem. Love. Normality seems a pretty reasonable price to pay for all of that. 


	35. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revelations || Post Ep: Home Again || G rated || for some reason I’m obsessed with Scully’s faith of late. Mea culpa for all the angst

The grief hits in waves. It’s gone and then it’s back, the intervals as regular and relentless as the flickering thickness of her bible pages, running past her thumb as the sermon lingers on. 

Time was she’d have Mulder’s hand as her anchor, she’d force her fingers still and line them up with his, rest her worries in the grooves on the back of his hands. She could now, if she were willing to reach out. He’s sitting beside her as they remember her mother but to take his hand would feel too much like a promise not to let it go again. So she worries the edge of her bible, Genesis through Revelations and the grounding thud of her thumb hitting leather, Sunday School familiar, at either end. 

Scully wonders where the testaments change. She feels like it should feel different somehow, lighter paper or a less archaic snick to the sound of the passing pages but that’s ridiculous and she should be thinking of her mother. She will always think of her mother. She tells herself that this death could be a nativity moment for her, she can commit her old testament to the past and seek out something new now that she is motherless, but she knows this is a lie. Scully can’t lie to herself in a church as they say mass for the woman who bore her. 

God, if he remembers her still, will be watching, probably with Maggie peeking over his shoulder.

So Scully lets go of the bible and without looking reaches for what she knows will be waiting. Her faith is rewarded with the warmth of his hand. The truth is that her old testament ended twenty-three years ago in the FBI basement and for better or worse, four more words she once spoke in the presence of God, Mulder is her partner for these chapters of her life. Their linked fingers find a well worn resting spot on the leather cover in Scully’s lap to rest. 

They have been too many funerals, and the next wave of grief is not for this death, but for the realisation that Mulder is the last person left she will mourn this way. Scully loves her brothers, but not with the soul-emptying intensity she loved her sister, her children or her mother. All of those loves now in the past tense.

There’s a breath on her cheek, Mulder’s, concerned eyes leaning as the grip on his hand passes tight and becomes terrified. 

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he whispers over the dying bars of the organ, and Scully’s only answer is a silent plea, somewhere between a promise and a prayer, that whenever he goes, she is allowed to follow. She can’t mourn him again. 

If God is listening, or her mother or father, Melissa... it doesn’t seem too much to ask, an absolution against a life spent in purgatory. One small act of grace for all she has lost.


	36. The Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fic prompt, based on an instagram post, fro @carrie11 on tumblr. Revival time fluff.

 

She smiles when she opens the package and it feels right to have him make her happy again. Small gestures help to chip away the years when every interaction was washed away by lost love and broken promises. This is a relearning, though many things are unforgotten - he hasn’t forgotten her size, or her badly hidden love for ribbons and wonky wrapping and there is no card. Even in their darkest times they never needed cards to read each others feelings.

She smiles when she tries them on, remembering him grabbing her foot one cold morning between two warm hands and wondering at how she got so far on high heels and tiny bones. She kicked him and he kissed her until big and small together felt just right.

She smiles every time she sees the two fox faces poke out of her pajama pants, nuzzling the flannel and reminding her of the part of Mulder she never got to know before. The Fox part; the boy who believed in family and walking away from some battles and sometimes just sitting by the fire and seeing only flames. He’s trying so hard to give her that, to bring his own light instead of just reflecting hers back, and she loves him for it.

She loves him for all of it; the dark and the despair, the colleague and the competitor, the believer, the lost boy, the lover and the friend. She has prayed many times to love him less, but today she’s glad that god works in mysterious ways…

Today, she loves him most for the fox slippers. 

Today she might tell him so.


	37. Unsaid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For @fictober and anyone who ever missed the chance to say what they felt. MSR. Angst. Ascension | deadalive | Requiem

 

**I.**

‘Keep it Fox.’ Her voice is kinder than he deserves and he wants to hurt her for it. Wants to hold her for it. The line between violence and catharsis is blurred with tears. 

‘But I lost her. Mrs Scully-’

‘Maggie. Call me-’

‘How can you bear to have me call you anything when I lost your daughter? And all for Duane fucking Barry’.

‘Because she’s not lost yet, only missing. And because you helped her find something I thought she never would. Because you lo-’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘Keep it Fox. Give it to her when you find her.’

‘I will… and I do..’

And he does.

* * *

 **II.**    

‘I know I said I wasn’t coming today. I made plans with mom, but then… well I ended up here. I always seem to end up here Mulder. Why do you always drag me out of reality and into places I shouldn’t want to be? 

There’s more people here than I expected for a holiday. I suppose it’s easier to be thankful for the dead than the living. They’re finished. No ugly little surprises or catches in their condolences. Bill is in town. I think he likes you more now you’re…

He definitely likes me more without you as my prefix.

I don’t like it. I hate it. I hate you.

No I don’t. I…

I never told you in person and I wont tell it to your tombstone Mulder but you know. Knew. 

Fuck. Past tense. It’s the past tense that gets me every time. Dammit Mulder! I just wish I knew that you knew.’

 

**III.**

‘Don’t wake me up. I won’t be able to let you do it if I’m awake.’ Her voice catches on the idea and threatens to run in to tears in the darkness.

‘I wont’

‘Don’t let me fall asleep though. I need every second. I need - I need -’

‘I know’.

‘Don’t make me raise him alone Mulder. Don’t go. Tell me you’ll come home again.’

‘I wont lie to you Scully. Dana. God, I hate that that still feels wrong in my mouth. That this -  _all of this_  - it’s a dream I have to wake up from and run away from and I never got to call you darling or make you breakfast or learn how to do the night feed and tell you every day that -’

‘I know. But there’s now. Tell me now. Tell me until it’s time to go. Tell me so I can tell him.’


End file.
